[in Japanese]

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In this year CIF (Common Industry Format) for usability test reports was standardized as ISO/IEC 25062. This seems that there is international tendency that software products would be required to be validated for usability or quality in use. In future evaluations related to usability would be critical practices in software development. It seems to be inevitable; however the evaluation environments are not almost prepared in Japanese IT industries. On the other hands, in Sapporo region the environments have been promoted under collaboration with industries and universities. Our fundamental approaches are the following; installment of open usability laboratories, training programs for usability test, development of tools for efficient testing and reservoir of the case studies.

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Sapporo IT Carrozzeria project as “Knowledge Cluster Initiative” at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) ended at the end of March in 2007. The project which started in 2002 included a sub-project related to usability that aimed to promote quality in use of software of embedded system. Software development platform for output of user-interface specification was envisioned. The platform was composed of some tools for user research, requirement analysis and definition, user interface design and usability evaluation and so on. As a result of the project, some patents could be applied and new businesses could be organized. Consequently the project might make some impacts on Japanese industries. On the contrary various problems were highlighted in managing the project. The implication would be referred for next industry-government-academia research projects.

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The purpose of this study is to discover a design methodology for User Centered Design (UCD). This paper focuses on Persona Method. Author proposed method to create Persona and also the method to utilize Persona on UCD process. Method to creating Persona consists of gathering user related information, define user property, creating candidate for Cast, user research for the candidate, decide Cast and main Persona.

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When we create new concept for new products, many of Japanese companies rarely validate the concept, in spite of importance for efficient product developing. Also we are not familiar with suitable approach for validation. This paper compared 2 approaches for validation, general method, asking directly user's intension of usage and our original method, “experience in daily life” for new concept X. “Experience in daily life” method can know really value of new experience and can find user's acceptability from social and psychological point of view. But general method has risk to lead wrong forecast of user's acceptability.

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The Operational Flow Chart is the most essential communication and design media for User Interface Design. This paper clarify the basic element of the Operational Flow Chart in design, the pattern type of Operational Flow and the way how to make it better one.

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This paper provides a view on classifying methods and tools for human-centered design (HCD). It introduces Newell and Card's table on the time scales of human action as a classifier of methods and tools. As an example, it assigns the use of guidelines and design principles to the social and organizational domain, the use of scenarios to the bounded rationality domain, and Hick's law and Fitts' law to the psychology domain of the time scales of human action.

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This paper describes the today's issues regarding knowledge and skill for Interface & Interaction Design in actual design groups.

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The workplace and the work style has been transforming as the economical situation and the IT (information technology) progress. It takes a general view from the viewpoint of four elements that compose Workplace and the work style, that is, “Person”, “Information”, “Place”, and “Event” of this change. The persona that becomes a key is “Hub type worker”, and he or she does dynamic communications, and it acts vividly while working outside box in the office like the city.

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This paper describes how to observe users or systems based on observation engineering method. The observation engineering method consists of observation check points and grasping systems, products and so on. The observation check points were created by observing users, products and systems and so on in HMI. The way of grasping systems, products and so on is to use the association rule and the single case experimental design chosen as good way. Examples using them were shown in the paper.

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When the usability practice is extended to the development of large-scale software, usual usability expertise is not sufficient to evaluate the characteristics of large-scale software development. By introducing the viewpoint of temporal sequence of operations of software products and systems, however, we can extend the usual usability concept and define five classes of usability practices. This extended concept can be defined as the natural usability, which is comprised of five classes of usability practices. In this paper, the characteristics of each class of natural usability are also briefly examined and explained.

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This paper describes quantitative evaluation method of usability quality of products. To grasp objectively the level of usability quality of the products, we conducted quantitative evaluation based on CIF. It is collected the method and problems around some case studies.

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We devised a checklist of business, user, and technology requirements in the design of user interface (UI), using as an example video display terminals in the context of computer systems. The checklist includes 1) those concerned with service planning, 2) those in problem solving, and 3) those concerned with the service goal. Analysis of business, user, and technology requirements using the UI items developed served to fulfill the goal of effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction.

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This paper describes the way how to educate specialists for usability and documentation.

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This paper is a case study of Tokyo Zokei University's interface design course. I explain the details of the course which is focused on the user centered design process, and discuss some issues.

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Although fatalities, injuries as well as the frequency of road accidents in Japan decreased last year, accidents among taxi cabs are increasing steadily. Reasons behind such increment are not certain, but effective counter measures are highly expected. Image-recording type drive-video-recorder is a new technology to just meet this demand and has been distributing rapidly among taxi last few years. Human centred or driver oriented analysis with data obtained from 200 taxi-cabs in Tokyo revealed that this new technology is very useful for accident/near accident analysis and prevention as well. Tele-field study disclosed frequent bicycle related near accidents can be solved through positive improvement for road environment rather than education.

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This paper firstly summarizes current standards related to Universal Design. Then a design process based on the Universal Design concept is proposed.

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The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (hereinafter referred to as “METI”) proposes “Innovation Superhighway plan”, and is developing the measure for the achievement of a plan concerned. As one of the concrete approaches, METI formulated the Strategic Technology Roadmap (hereinafter referred to as “the STR”) as a navigating tool for strategic planning and implementation of R&D investment in cooperation with industry, academia, and public institution, and opened to the public. It greatly contributes to the construction of the National innovation system. It is expected that Human-centered-design strategic policy roadmap would also be good communication tool.

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In a traditional water fall model development process, there was a problem with a very large makeup time due to the defect of quality in use. However, changing process which has already established has a high risk. In order to solve such a problem, it is effective to build the process “Specification review” into the water fall model development process. This paper describes a summary of “Specification review” which has a same effect as the usability evaluation.

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