DIY Usability

All Rights Reserved © Alcatel-Lucent 2006

Do-It-Yourself Usability!

What developers can do themselves

Jan Moons

All Rights Reserved © Alcatel-Lucent 20082 | SI infrastructure

Easy-to-use


What is usability?

Being user-friendly Making products easy to use Window dressing

Specifying fonts Specifying color schemes Making good Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

User testing Etc.

Usability is much more


Usability - ISO 9241 definition

The effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specified users achieve specified goals in particular environments.


Usability is an outcome of UCD practices

‘User-Centered Design (UCD) is a user interface design process that focuses on usability goals, user characteristics, environments, tasks and workflow in the design of an interface. The UCD process is an iterative process, where design and evaluation steps are built in

from the first stage of projects, through implementation.’

Shawn Lawton Henry - Accessibility in UCD process


User-Centered Design Process

Analyze Design Evaluate Implement


Do-It-Yourself?!

Can developers follow the UCD process and conduct usability studies themselves?

Many of the usability techniques are relatively simple Many usability activities can be conducted in-house

Alcatel-Lucent has a large pool of people at your finger tips, who are willing to help you out

BUT be careful to only recruit the people that fit your user profile! Recruit via friends and family network

The more you do it the better you will get at it!


Analysis Phase



Understanding users, tasks and their context

1. Users Who will use the system? What are their characteristics?

2. Tasks What are the different tasks people have to perform? How do they perform their tasks to achieve their goals?

Means: pen, paper, telephone, etc.

What are the different steps? Have to be performed in a specific order?

What issues exist with the current tools? What is not working? What is missing? What do they do today to circumvent these problems?

How often do they perform the task? Easy-to-use vs. easy-to-learn

3. Environments Physical environment Social environment Cultural environment


Identify the users of the system

Create user profiles:

1. Assemble a team to brainstorm a preliminary list of potential users with their assumed characteristics

2. Look for competitive products and their corresponding users profiles

3. Look for studies on the Web

4. Look for studies at your marketing department

These assumptions have to be checked against real users,

you recruit based on these profiles!


Developers of the system are NOT the users!

‘We tend to project our own rationalizations and beliefs onto the actions and beliefs of others’

Donald Norman - The design of everyday things


Some useful methods for performing task analysis

Contextual inquiry: Observe users in own environment Let them perform their daily work Think aloud Facilitator acts as apprentice and asks clarifying questions

Condensed ethnographic interview: Combination of semi-structured interview, observation and gathering artifacts Ask to perform certain tasks Think aloud Gather and discuss artifacts (documents, screenshots, etc.)

Incident diary: Gather data over a longer period of time Users keep a diary with specific questions they have to answer Interview user afterwards about answers Suitable for important but infrequent tasks


Incident diary PeCMan


What about interviews?


Design Phase



Conceptual/Design model


From user (mental) to designer (conceptual) model

Ensure the design is based on the user requirements (analysis phase)

Use scenarios or task descriptions, to describe typical interaction, and base the design on them: Nouns in the scenarios are the objects/attributes of the design Verbs lead to actions for the design

Use the user’s terminology

Use Metaphors (e.g. trash can, folders, etc.): Use of real world objects Users have image of how it works in the real world and assume it

works the same in the virtual one (Support the user’s model)


Paper prototype - first ideas

PeCMan paper prototype


Low vs. high fidelity


Usability competitive analysis

Look at the user experience of the competition to gather ideas for your design: GUI features

Direct competitors Same domain Good features to implement Bad features to prevent

Surrogate products Different domain Interesting concepts that you would like to use in your product Similar features E.g. Shopping cart


Design patterns

Best practices for designing a Graphical User Interface (GUI) What is it? Use when? Why use it? How to use it?

Input Hints Input prompt

Intriguing Branches


Parallel design

1. The design team is given a requirements/functional document so that the design work starts from the same starting point for every designer

2. Define the boundaries of the parallel design effort: Goal of system Tasks that it should support User characteristics - personas!

3. Each designer independently creates an initial design from the same set of requirements

4. Show-and-tell: each designer explains his/her solution5. Each designer uses everyone else’s proposed system to complete a task6. The design team considers each solution, based on this experience, and each

designer uses the best ideas to further improve their own solution or they could be merged into a single solution

7. As long as the design team is not satisfied with the final solution, steps 3 to 6 are executed on the improved design

8. The objective is to settle on one or two design concepts, based on the total effort, that can be tested by the users that fit the profile of the system we are building


PeCMan design 1


PeCMan design 2


Best of both worlds


Evaluation Phase



Evaluation Phase

Evaluate early From first sketches Don’t wait until everything is written in code, cost is too high to

change Throwing away a sketch is less costly

Evaluate often From the moment you have some kind of idea on paper, test it! Hallway testing: 5 minute tests with colleagues to remove the most

obvious mistakes! Evaluate with real users

Check your conceptual model with the mental model of real users


Usability testing (user testing)


Summary

How to make easy-to-use products?!

We need to understand the potential users, their tasks and the environments these tasks are performed in

Create a conceptual model that closely matches the user’s mental model

Evaluate and validate the design with real users as early as possible and as much as possible


Questions and how to proceed?


Thank you!

Contact:

Jan Moons Email: [email protected]

DIY Usability

Design

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