SUMMARY

Heuristics are rules of thumb providing guidance for choosing design actions, given the current state of the design process. They are used by designers to save time and resources in exchange for satisfactory, but not necessarily optimal, solutions. These rules of thumb are known to be developed through a designer’s experiences (among other sources), but there is a large knowledge gap in understanding how heuristics are retrieved and employed by designers. Additionally, designers may not even be aware of some heuristics they engage during design. Having a better awareness of one’s own set of heuristics could improve the design process in many ways. Heuristics from experience can be relayed to new team members, improve training processes, and shorten the learning curve on the road to design expertise. Understanding the heuristics used by team members outside of a designer’s own domain or expertise can improve the team’s shared mental model of the design. Lastly, describing how heuristics are used may lead to prescribing how heuristics should be used. Being able to justify the use of one heuristic over another will lead to more effective decision making in design. To do this, the heuristics must first be obtained using a repeatable scientific research methodology. Then, we must determine and obtain measurable critical attributes that a designer can use to determine which heuristic(s) is(are) most valuable given the design applicability context. To that end, the following research questions are addressed within this dissertation research: How should the methodology for extracting heuristics be improved such that we may assess the value a heuristic brings to the design process? What aspects of heuristics and design environments should be considered during documentation of heuristics in a repository? How might heuristics be characterized and classified to understand their impact on design processes?