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© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
Thus, direct contact with customers is an essential part of the HITC's business model. The HITC is funded by revenue generated by work for customers. An essential part of the HITC's business model is the NCR sales and marketing organizations. The NCR sales force has become an active and enthusiastic partner in selling HITC services to its customers. The Center hosts over 150 customer visits to its Atlanta facility each year.
User-centered design (UCD) is practiced on all HITC projects. The HITC's UCD process comprises four iterative phases: Analysis, Design, Evaluation, and Implementation. The HITC has formalized methods that are performed within each phase (e.g., shadow visits, usability evaluation, icon design). Most customer engagements within the HITC are initiated by the UCD Analysis phase, in which a team conducts a needs-finding analysis to uncover user, task, and environment characteristics.
NCR established the HITC in 1988 on the campus of Georgia Tech. Originally, the Center was envisioned as a transfer agent of human-interface technology between the research community and NCR development organizations. Customer demand caused the HITC to shift its charter to address external customer needs. The HITC has grown to include over 90 associates working in a wide variety of human-interface technologies. As part of a corporation with a very strong international presence, the HITC works with customers world-wide. Areas of focus for the Center reflect those of NCR Corporation: retail, financial, and general computer and communications markets. Also, the Center participates in several government-sponsored consortia.
The New User Interface group explores and assesses appropriate I/O technologies (including voice, pen, and gesture) that can be combined to enhance communication between humans and computers. Several HITC groups work to provide intelligent support to end users. The Image Understanding group uses machine vision algorithms to analyze data generated by video cameras to derive new information about customer behaviors (e.g., tracking where customers go in a store, or measuring queue sizes in a bank branch). The Knowledge Discovery group uses knowledge-engineering principles to capture and codify human analyses and decisions so that they can be applied to business problems. The Intelligent Systems group uses knowledge engineering with rule- and case-based reasoning systems to create adaptive and intelligent tutoring applications for training and performance support environments. Finally, the Product Development group integrates computer hardware, software, and network elements into cost effective solutions. This team is staffed with seasoned developers, computer architects, and development managers.
Merck-Medco Managed Care, Inc. employed the HITC to design its EXPERxT (Windows) application, which pharmacy-benefits managers and clinicians at corporations, insurance carriers, and HMOs use to extract patient, prescriber, pharmacy, drug, and benefits-plan data from an information warehouse and interpret the data for them. The HITC gathered Merck-Medco and end-user requirements via interviews and assessments of an existing application, designed the user interface with the aid of rapid prototyping tools, iterated the design based on feedback, and evaluated the implemented product in the field.
The Trauma Care Information Management System (TCIMS) uses a variety of computer configurations and wireless communications to allow emergency medical providers to document, exchange, and access patient information from their first point of encounter with the patient in the field through the emergency room of the hospital. In the military world, the system is also being designed for possible use by non-medical warfighters in the field in cases where medical providers themselves are incapacitated. Extensive assessment and analysis of user needs was conducted through observation of potential users, interviews, and literature reviews. Rapid prototyping of designs, that were later implemented in more robust forms, and iterative evaluation of the system has been taking place since 1994. A novel configuration of lightweight computers, peripherals, and interfaces for quick information capture, access, and exchange has resulted from this effort. The system is currently in alpha test at military and civilian ambulance services and hospitals.
APRICOTS is a produce identification training system for grocery store cashiers. The system teaches cashiers to identify produce items by name and price lookup (PLU) code. The training provides external instructional events to support the cashier's internal processes of learning. Interviews and observations were used to understand the cashiers' job and relevant issues in produce recognition training. Then, an adaptive instructional design strategy and associated graphical user interface was developed. An evaluation at a large supermarket chain will be used to obtain feedback from cashiers on the effectiveness of APRICOTS' underlying instructional design compared to current training methods.
The Management Discovery Tool (MDT) [1] is an NCR data mining tool that allows users (managers, executives, database administrators) to generate reports summarizing situations, trends, and events from their data warehouse without knowing SQL query language or the structure of their data. Initial requirements were gathered via customer interviews, focus groups, analysis of similar products and previous prototypes. A task analysis was performed on these data. Interface ideas/prototypes were generated via sketches and Visual Basic. Prototypes were evaluated via user interviews, design reviews and usability testing. Then, a user-interface specification (6 versions) was written. Other interface and functional modifications have been made concurrent with development. Beta tests begin in December 1995, to be followed by a series of point releases.
The National Medical Practices Knowledge Banks project (funded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology) will result in an on-line, intelligent multimedia desk reference (including text, audio, narrated surgery video, relevant medical images and virtual reality simulations) for medical specialties (initially neurosurgery). Users include medical professionals and students. The project is conducted by a consortium comprising NIST, NCR, AT&T, Allegheny-Singer Research Institute, Allegheny General Hospital, Allegheny University of Health Sciences, Carnegie-Mellon University and Clark-Atlanta University. The planned system will include support tools and services that facilitate the capture, organization, access to, and use of expert experience and knowledge. These tools and services will include computer-supported conferencing, synthetic interviews with experts, illustrative cases and patient management plans, on-line references, medical procedures video and case data. The HITC is conducting needs finding (ethnographic field study), participatory design (scenario-based design), formal task/scenario representation, user interface design and usability evaluations. Nearing completion of the first year of a five-year effort, field trials and a usability evaluation of a demonstration system will begin in late 1996.
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