Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Usability
What is Usability?
Ease of learning
Ease of use
Ease of remembering
Subjective satisfaction
Efficiency of use
Effectiveness of use
Usability Engineering
Usability Engineering (UE):
Processes to build Usability into
products
Various methods can be used
throughout the design lifecycle
Methods can be incorporated into
design process easily
Methods maintain focus on user
throughout design
Benefits of UE to an
Organization
Reduce training costs
Reduce development costs
Identify and fix problems early
for
support personnel/help desks
fixes, maintenance, upgrades
Usability Principles
Mini-Exercise
Apply the principles to a web-site of
your choosing, or try:
http://www.lingscars.co.uk
http://www.constellation7.org
http://www.sixtiespress.co.uk/
http://www.leoneck.ch
http://www.dsrny.com/
Basic Principles
Assume users
Have not read the manual
Have not attended training
Do not have external help readily at
hand
So
All controls should be clear and
understandable and placed in an intuitive
location on the screen.
Use Scenario
Development
You already know about use
cases
Use scenarios are just a single
thread through a use case
much simpler!
UI Structure/Flow of Control
UI Structure/Flow of Control
This matters much less than it
used to. Why?
What can you do about it?
Interface Standards
Design
The interface standards are the
basic design elements that are
common across the screens,
forms, and reports within the
system.
Example
What do you think of this?
Interface Design
Prototyping
Storyboard
HTML Prototype
Language Prototype
Interface Evaluation
Heuristic
Walkthrough
Interactive
Creating a UI Prototype
Low-fidelity prototypes are
good! e.g.
Paper prototype
Visio/HTML/PPT/ prototype
Example
Exercise Part 1
Design the web-site for your customer.
Consider: What is the purpose of the web-site?
Who are the users? What features and tools are
needed in such a web-site?
Are these already documented as requirements?
Have you documented any usability requirements?
Exercise Part 2
Create a scenario for one part of the site
based on your most important use case
(happy case).
Create a (possibly paper) prototype that
realizes your scenario.
Walk through the prototype yourself
(pretend to be a user).
Think about the flow of the site, layout,
visual appeal, use of colors, icons, etc.
Save your work!!!!!
Heuristic
Evaluation
Set of guidelines for creating usable
GUIs
See:
http://www.stcsig.org/usability/topics/
articles/he-checklist.html
for a good example of a set of
Interface/Dialogue Design
The team needs to worry about:
Layout (of buttons, text, table
data, )
Structuring data entry (tab order)
Controlling data input (validation
and format controls)
Feedback (prompting, status,
warning, and error messages)
Dialogue sequencing
What Is a Dialogue?
A sequence of interactions
between the system and a user
Dialogue design involves:
Designing a dialogue sequence
Building a prototype
Assessing usability
User in Control
Rather the users perception of
control
No mothering principle user
should feel that they initiate
actions
Feedback is necessary for this
to work
Consistency
The conformance to the GUI vendors
standards
A GUI developer must not be too creative and
innovative in the interface design.
Personalization &
Customization
GUI personalization is customization for
personal use
e.g. a user reorders and resizes columns in a
grid display and saves these changes as
preferences
Forgiveness
A good interface allows users to
experiment and make mistakes in a
forgiving way
Forgiveness encourages interface
exploration because the user is allowed
to take erroneous routes that can be
rolled back (even to the starting point if
necessary).
forgiveness implies facilities such as a multilevel undo operation and the ability to cancel
long-running actions
Feedback
The feedback guideline is a spin-off
of the first guideline the user in
control.
To be in control involves knowing
whats going on when the control is
temporarily with the program.
The developer should build visual
and/or audio cues for every user
event.
Hourglass, wait indicator
the
the
the
the
the
the
the
How many
groups are
there in
this image?
How do you
know?
What do
the radio
buttons
apply to?
How do you
know?
What do
you see in
the image
to the
right?
What is it
really?
Color Example
Exercise Part 3
Choose three more scenarios for your
web-site based on your use cases.
Create a prototype (paper, HTML, Visio,
) for these scenarios and walk through
them.
Ensure that your GUI has enough detail
that a user can walk through the entire
process.
This may involve creating several
snapshots of your screen designs in
different states
messages.
Simple rules for error messages:
Usability Testing
To identify problems
Typical users perform typical
tasks
Collect data
Objective: Task times, error rates
Subjective: Ratings, Comments,
Observations
Preparation
Determine who and what to
evaluate
What questions do you want to
answer?
Think-aloud Approach
Users should navigate throughout
the website and say aloud what
they are thinking and doing as they
do so
Users should understand they can
make both negative and positive
comments
Record all user comments
Develop an interview protocol to
guide your discussion with users
probe on issues of concern
Post-Test Work
Analyze data
Identify usability problems AND
SOLUTIONS
Identify problem severity
Identify software bugs (maybe)
Conduct second round of testing (if
necessary) and if time/resources
permit
Caveats
User preferences do not always
correspond to performance.
What users say is not always
what they do.
Consider all user groups.
Just conducting the test is not
enoughincorporate the
findings.
Exercise Part 4
Evaluate your GUI for your web-site
(consider the usability principles and
testing techniques).
Plan tests for at least the four scenarios
that you have previously created.
Get at least three users (people who are
NOT in this class) to walk through and
evaluate your design.
Perform your measurements, interviews,
observations, etc.
Exercise Part 5
Summarize what you have learned
in terms of usability principles.
Redesign your original web-site
concept.
But now do it explicitly considering
the design heuristics!
State how your design has changed
as a result of the testing.
Exercise Part 6
Summarize your evaluation
experience:
in a report and in a presentation
Preparing a Summary
Report
Describe your objectives, measures, and
procedures
Describe your results:
list key problems identified by users; there
is likely to be some uniformity among
responses (e.g., common concerns,
problems, issues)
sort problems by priority and frequency