1.

HIT2316/6316 Usability
Intended Learning Outcomes
1. Describe the process and principles of User-Centred Design and explain the role of User-Centred Design in the software development process. 2. Discuss different methods of researching, analysing and documenting context of use (i.e., users, goals and tasks and environment). 3. Set and justify measurable usability requirements. 4. Create a prototype user interface and discuss design decisions in relation to: a. conceptual design, b. design guidelines, c. interface elements, and d. psychological principles. 5. Discuss different usability evaluation methods and critically evaluate user interface designs using both inspection and empirical usability evaluation methods. 6. Describe and follow guidelines for the ethical treatment of research participants.

Generic Graduate Skills

1. Develop strategies to work collaboratively in a small team. 2. Prepare effective written and oral reports.

Note: The aim of these notes is to provide you with a broad outline and context for the material you are expected to learn in usability. These notes are not intended to be your primary resource. You are strongly advised to read the text book.

HIT2316/6316 Usability Karola von Baggo

Faculty of Comunication and Information Technology Swinburne University of Technology

1.2

Intended Learning Outcome 1

Describe the principles and process of User-Centred Design and explain the role of UserCentred Design in the software development process. Assessment Criteria: Criterion Not ready to pass Pass
Student is able to provide complete and mostly correct description of the following concepts: UCD principles, UCD process, ISO denition of usability, basic phases of software development, software quality. Student is able to explain the relationship between UCD and software development on at least one dimension. Explanation may not be entirely clear or well expressed.

CreditDistinction
In addition, student is able to illustrate UCD principles and process within a given situation. Student is able to explain the relationship between UCD process and principles. Student is able to offer a good explanation of the relationship between UCD and software development. Student is able to address the relationship on more than one dimension.

High Distinction
In addition student shows evidence of a sophisticated understanding of UCD and its contribution to software development.

Knowledge and Student is unable to understanding provide a complete or largely correct description of the following concepts: UCD principles, UCD process, ISO denition of usability, basic phases of software development, software quality. Student is unable to provide an explanation of the relationship between any aspects of UCD and software development.

Module 01 User-Centred Design: Presentation 01.1: Usability Presentation 01.2: User-Centred Design Lecture Discussion Questions Tutorial 01: Introduction Assessment Method Summative Assessment: Response to short essay question in nal exam. Formative Assessment: Tutorial Exercises. Required Reading: Stone et al. Chapter 1 Stone et al. Chapter 29 Extra Reading: Bias, R. G. & C-M, Karat (2005). Justifying Cost-Justifying Usability. In Bias, R. G. and Mayhew, D. J. Cost-justifying usability: An update for the internet age (2nd Ed). Morgan Kaufmann: San Franciso. (available as e-book from Library catalogue)

HIT2316/6316 Usability Karola von Baggo

Faculty of Comunication and Information Technology Swinburne University of Technology

1.3

Presentation 01.1 Usability

Introduction To get your degree, most of you will do the equivalent of 24 units of study. Each of these will help you bring technological solutions into problems people face in their lives. Usability is about trying to make sure that you bring the right solution to the people. The one that will most improve their lives. No matter how elegant the code, or expensive the technology, there is no point giving people a system that will make their life harder and cause them pain. The purpose of this presentation is to start answering the questions: What is usability? Why does usability matter? What do you have to do to get a usable product? First, I will start by introducing the idea that people expect products to be easy to use and about how usability benets developers and the community they serve. I will then talk about how usability is dened and the way in which the denition gives us clues about how to get it. Finally, I will say a few words about the process of making usable products by talking about the basic principles of User-Centred Design. The rest of the semester will largely be focused on this last question.

People want products that are usable.

What People Care About In the past computers were programmed by the people who used them. Or by people very like them. It was part of the fun of it, tinkering around trying to get the code to do what you wanted it to do. Its not like that today. Today, everyone is touched by technology, whether they like it or not. You dont even have to own a computer to be affected by the dreams of system designers and programmers (just think about the use of technology in the medical, banking and government sectors not to mention train ticket systems, microwaves and air-conditioners). Unfortunately, the majority of people today dont want to think about the code, or about the way the system is put together. Its not because they are dumb, rather its because all they care about is doing what they want to do. Whether thats formatting a business report, making a telephone call, arranging photos, playing a game or listening to music. Anything that gets in the way of what they want to do is an annoyance and a reason not to use a product.
HIT2316/6316 Usability Karola von Baggo Faculty of Comunication and Information Technology Swinburne University of Technology

1.4

Developers need to make products that are usable.

Product Success If people dont like a product, and they have a choice, then they wont use it, or wont buy something from you again, or wont recommend it to their friends. If people dont have a choice because they have to use it at work, then they may perform poorly at their job, or even decide not to come to work (i.e., take sick days). Indeed, some measures of usability in industry environments count number of sick days as a measure of success for a new system.

Usability is not something that can be added at the end of development.

Usability is Not the Icing on the Cake No developer intentionally sets out to build a bad product. However, sometimes usability is perceived as something that can be added at the end. A bit like the icing on the cake, a nishing touch to make it look good. Aesthetics (how good something looks) certainly contributes to the user experience. However, no amount of icing is going to turn a pumpkin and zucchini cake into a chocolate cake!

Usability has the greatest impact in the early stages of development.

Usability The concern of usability is more than the surface appeal of a product. It is about allowing users to work (or play) in a way that meets their needs. It goes to the underlying structure of the interaction, the sequence in which people do tasks and the way in which information is organised. Sometimes early decisions about system architecture can constrain the possible user interactions with the product. Therefore it is important to consider usability early in the process.

Make usability a key part of product development.

Learn about Usability Applied with intelligence and care, the things you learn in this unit will help you develop products that will meet the needs of your users. My hope is that at the end of this unit you will build on your skills and intuition to create great products.

Usability is the extent to which a product can be...

The ISO 9241-11 Denition of Usability ISO is the International Organization for Standardization which species good practice in a range of disciplines. They have a section on UserCentred Design and Usability. They dene usability as: The extent to which a product can be used by specied users to achieve specied goals with
HIT2316/6316 Usability Karola von Baggo Faculty of Comunication and Information Technology Swinburne University of Technology

1.5

effectiveness, efciency and satisfaction in a specied context of use. The denition, as does most of the ISO standards, comes from a background of business and military products for which there has traditionally been a strong focus on time and motion. The denition does not necessarily capture the full meaning of what it means for a product to be usable. However, it is useful as a starting point and provides an insight into the concerns of usability.

...used by specied users to achieve specied goals...

Users Achieving Goals The ISO denition of usability recognises that usability is dependent on the context of the interaction. Usable products are designed for particular users to carry out particular tasks in particular environments. A common trap for developers is that they build a product that works, but only for a particular type of user (usually one like themselves). Problems then arise when the intended (real) users try to use the product. So, if you design for the wrong user (i.e., yourself, or some imagined user you have dreamt up while sitting at your computer), your product will not be successful with the real users. One thing that should be clear from this is, that to design a usable product, you must have an extremely good idea of who your users are and what they are trying to achieve.

...with effectiveness, efciency and satisfaction...

Usability Measures ISO renes the concept of usability by narrowing it down to three dimensions, effectiveness, efciency and satisfaction. Effectiveness: the accuracy and completeness with which specied users can achieve specied goals in a specied environment; Efciency: the resources expended in relation to the accurac and completeness of the goals achieved; Satisfaction: the comfort and acceptability of the work system to its users and the people affected by its use Stone et al (2005)

...in a specied context of use.

Context of Use A lot of technology use occurs in air-conditioned comfort. Some technology needs to work well in other types of circumstances such as; on the road, in extreme temperatures, with constant interruptions, or in dirty environments. A product designed for one environment will obviously not work as well in a different environment. So, it is important that you know what kind of environment your product will be used in. Note: ISO implies that 'environment = context of use' in this denition, but later appears to assume that 'users + tasks and goals + environment = context of use'. The latter description will be used in this unit except in regard to the denition of usability.
HIT2316/6316 Usability Karola von Baggo Faculty of Comunication and Information Technology Swinburne University of Technology

1.6

Usability is good value for money.

Return on Investment Implementing a User-Centred Design process does not come for free. Time and money need to be spent on planning, implementing and analysing the results of UCD activities. Building a case to persuade your team or managers to spend resources on UCD activities is an important part of the process. There are a number of points at which usability can contribute to the bottom line. It will help if we have a quick look at the type of activities typically undertaken in a software development project before we start this discussion. These are: Requirements denition (establish goals of users and any constraints) System Software Design (developing the system architecture) Implementation and unit testing (developing components) Integration and system testing (putting components together) Operation and maintenance (system installation and use)

Usability prevents costly late design changes.

Late Design Changes If you look across the development life cycle, in the early stages of requirements gathering, there are a multitude of potential design solutions to be considered. As development progresses and decisions are made about the direction of the product, the possible number of design alternatives decrease, until at the end you have that one design that is nally deployed. An implication of this is that early on in the process you may have a lot of freedom to decide what gets built. But as you start building things your ability to change decreases because you might waste the work already done. So while a design change may cost $1 to x in the early stages of requirements gathering, it might cost $100 to change later in the development process. Starting requirements with an early focus on the users can help pick up problems before design problems progress into the development or deployment phase and hence save money.

Usability inuences sales and customer support calls.

Sales and Support Good usability can affect the desirability of the product. As people become more familiar with a product they can develop stronger preferences for ease of use over functionality that they never use. When trying to sell stuff on the web, easy to use is particularly important. A competitors website is only a back button away on the users Google search list. Support calls is sometimes overlooked by
HIT2316/6316 Usability Karola von Baggo Faculty of Comunication and Information Technology Swinburne University of Technology

1.7

the development team because it generally not something that goes into their budget. However, a large volume of support calls can be a big drain on a company and even small improvements in usability can be benecial if they reduce calls to the help line.

Usability inuences productivity, errors and training.

Business Sense Improvements in the usability of a product can increase the productivity of the users. Imagine if you reduced the processing time of a transaction by a few seconds by improving the usability of the product. You could eliminate the need to open a new window, or reduce the number of data entry errors by reformatting the entry eld. In a large system this may equate to thousands of dollars of staff time. Even in small systems the savings gains can be considerable. Another source of savings is in training time. Often teams justify poor usability by putting their faith in training (I.e., we dont have to worry about that, training will take care of it). However, training can be very expensive, not just because you have to employ trainers. The workers also have to take time off for the training.

Usability is the product of User-Centred Design.

User-Centred Design So far I have talked about what usability is. Now I would like to touch on how you get a usable product. Designing for usability is sometimes thought of as simply using common sense. Unfortunately, common sense doesnt seem all that common. It is also difcult to apply if you are not fully informed about the users, their goals and the context they are working in. User-Centred Design (UCD) is a process that you can use to help insure that your nal product can be used as intended. Later, I will talk some more about the process of UCD, for the moment I would like to address the three key principles of UCD; early focus on users, measurement and iteration.

The rst principle is early focus on users and tasks.

Early Focus on Users Sometimes, when usability is factored into a project time line, it is tacked on to the end with an item such as Usability Test. Although doing a usability test at the end can be useful in terms of identifying how usable your nal product is, it doesnt help you actually design a usable product in the rst place. To do that you have to start with the concerns of the user at the very beginning of the project. As we have already discussed, you need to identify who the users are, what they are like and what they are trying to achieve. If you dont do this you run the risk of your product being misdirected and not satisfying the people who pay your bills.

The second principle is measurement.

HIT2316/6316 Usability Karola von Baggo Faculty of Comunication and Information Technology Swinburne University of Technology

1.8

Measurement Imagine you set yourself the goal of your product being easy to use. How will you tell whether you have met this goal? A key aspect of any engineering process is to have measures of success so you know you have built the product to specications. The same is true for usability. Unless you can measure your usability outcomes you cant tell if you have been successful or not. Example measures for effectiveness might be the number of tasks successfully completed, for efciency, the time taken to do a task and for satisfaction, it could be a score on a satisfaction questionnaire. The appropriate measure will depend on the product under development.

The third principle is iterative design.

Iteration I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. Thomas Edison (inventor of the light bulb amongst other things). It is unlikely that your rst idea to solve a design problem will be the best. Unfortunately, good design cant be engineered according to a xed set of rules (however, we will talk about design guidelines later in the semester). By its nature, design involves a certain amount of experimentation with alternative solutions to nd the best solution. Iteration is the process of creating a design, testing it, revising it according to the results of the testing, and testing it again. Prototyping is a key component of this process and we will also be learning more about this in a couple of weeks.

Can you make usability a feature of your work?

Use the opportunity you have in this unit to learn how to create products that help people in their daily lives rather than make it a misery for them. Usability will also come in handy during the rest of your degree. Most 'programming' units don't include 'usability' as a criteria in their marking schemes. However, most of the project units do. These are units where you develop a piece of software for a real client. Depending on the product you may need to take usability quite seriously. In fact many conveners require you to do usability testing.

Usability is not the icing on the cake. Learn how to make usability part of your work. Usability connects people and technology.

You can't prevent people from putting beans in their noses. But you shouldn't stuff beans in their noses." - Stan Schwartz

HIT2316/6316 Usability Karola von Baggo

Faculty of Comunication and Information Technology Swinburne University of Technology

1.9

Presentation 01.2 User-Centred Design

The purpose of this presentation is to provide you with an overview of User-Centred Design (UCD) activities. As the unit progresses we will step through each of the phases of the UCD process in more detail. Before we begin I will start by outlining the issue of Software Quality and the

Software should be good.

Most developers set out to make good software.

Software developers are responsible for software quality.

ISO 8402 Denes quality as: The totality of characteristics of an entity that bear on its ability to satisfy stated and implied needs. The term characteristics in this denition is very broad. It covers a lot of things from how nice the code is to whether the user is happy with the colour scheme. Luckily there is another ISO standard that breaks this down a bit further...

Software quality is comprised of six attributes.

Software Quality ISO 9126 identies six aspects of software quality:

HIT2316/6316 Usability Karola von Baggo

Faculty of Comunication and Information Technology Swinburne University of Technology

1.10

Attribute functionality

Description the capability of the software to provide functions which meet stated and implied needs when the software is used under specied conditions. the capability of the software to maintain its level of performance when used under specied conditions. the capability of the software to be understood, learned, used and liked by the user, when used under specied conditions. the capability of the software to provide the required performance, relative to the amount of resources used, under stated conditions. the capability of the software to be modied. Modications may include corrections, improvements or adaptation of the software to changes in environment, and in requirements and functional specications. the capability of software to be transferred from one environment to another.

reliability

usability

efciency

maintainability

portability

You will notice that usability is one of the six.

Usability is an attribute of software quality.

In an IT degree you will have units devoted to different aspects of making good software. In this unit of course we will be concerned with the usability aspect of software quality. That is, strategies for optimising the usability of the products you make.

User-Centred Design provides a method for obtaining usability.

User-Centred Design Software Development Life Cycles (SDLC) are management tools that help the development team track and plan their progress through the term of the project. You need a life cycle model to plan what you do, it provides you with a guide as to what kinds of things have to get done to get the software built. User-Centred Design (UCD) is a SDLC model that has grown out of concern for the user. The question posed by a UCD approach is not How can we use this technology But How can we best support the
HIT2316/6316 Usability Karola von Baggo Faculty of Comunication and Information Technology Swinburne University of Technology

1.11

user. Sometimes the answer might not be in the technology. I will now discuss the ve parts of the UCD process.

Include User-Centred Design activities in your process plan.

Planning To include User-Centred Design activities in your life cycle, you need to plan for them. Management Get management buy-in on a User-Centred approach. Different organisations have different levels of maturity when it comes to employing a User-Centred approach. Some may already be on the way to a User-Centred focus. Others may not yet understand how the process might benet the organisation and may resist the notion of spending time and money on user-centred design activities. As an advocate of UCD you need to be prepared to argue the case for UCD. Plan to include User-Centred tasks in your process. Schedule If you dont put UCD activities in the to-do list, they wont get done. When developing a time line you need to block in time for UCD. Courage & Baxter have example timelines of how long it takes to set up various UCD activities. For some activities it may take a number of weeks to get everything prepared. Money Budget for User-Centred Design activities. UCD activities do require resources. There may be equipment to purchase, or people with specialist skills may need to be brought in not
HIT2316/6316 Usability Karola von Baggo Faculty of Comunication and Information Technology Swinburne University of Technology

1.12

to mention the person hours involved in setting up, gathering and analysing data. This is an important stage of the UCD process. However, we do not have time to go into any more depth on this topic. Some issues are followed up in Chapter 29 of Stone et al. You may also do other units in your degree which look at management issues in more detail.

Research the context of use to understand the problem domain.

User Characteristics Gather data on user characteristics. Gathering information about your users is the rst step in understanding who your users are. Important characteristics may be previous experience with technology, attitude towards computers and motivation to master the product. We will talk more about this next week. Goals and Tasks Gather data on user goals, tasks and activities. As will be come evident next week, user goals are a key motivating factor in understanding what the product has to do. One important point to note is that goals and tasks are different. For example, for a paramedic, the task may be to nd the quickest route to his patients location, but his goal is to save the patients life. The goal doesnt change, but the way he achieves it might. Environment Gather data on the environment The system environment can be analysed in terms of a number of different dimensions such as the physical, social and technical environment.

Specify usability requirements to ensure quality of use.

Effectiveness: Users can achieve their goals completely and accurately. Efciency: Users can achieve their goals with an acceptable amount of effort. Satisfaction: Users are free from discomfort and have a positive attitude towards the product.

Prototype alternative design solutions.

Rene Requirements Rene requirements by showing prototypes to users and clients. Sometimes it is difcult for users to get an idea of what you are proposing as the solution for their problem. Showing them your ideas with prototypes is an effective way of communicating your understanding of their problem. Iterative Design To get one good idea, get many ideas. Explore designs quickly with low and mid-delity prototyping. Remember one of the key principles of UCD was iterative design (i.e., design, test, redesign)? Doing this with real code makes the process very resource intensive. You can reduce the resources required by using low delity prototyping. The
HIT2316/6316 Usability Karola von Baggo Faculty of Comunication and Information Technology Swinburne University of Technology

1.13

ability to do rapid prototyping will be one of the most valuable skills you to take away from this unit.

Evaluate whether your design meets your usability requirements.

Evaluation Test early, test often. You dont have to wait until you have a fully functioning bit of code to do testing. Testing can begin at any stage, even on paper based sketches. This process is known as formative testing. Usability Evaluation Methods Choose a technique to suit your time, budget and prototype. There are arrange of different techniques you can use do get an evaluation on your design. Which technique you choose will depend on time, money and how far along your prototype is along the development path. (Almost) any evaluation is better than no evaluation. I would like to say that any evaluation will help you improve your designs. However, that is not quite true. Making important decisions based on poorly conceived evaluations may ultimately do more harm than good. Indeed I have known people to loose faith in the process quite completely because of this kind of thing. Thus, you do need to understand the limitations of the different kinds of methods. Evaluate whether your design meets your usability requirements.

Can you implement User-Centred Design to improve your product?

Responsible software developers deliver quality software.

Usability is one of six software quality attributes.

Implement User-Centred Design to maximise usability.

"... this is so simple a ve year old child could understand it. "Quick, run out and bring me a ve year old child." - Groucho Marx

HIT2316/6316 Usability Karola von Baggo

Faculty of Comunication and Information Technology Swinburne University of Technology