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September 6, 1999

New Mantra: Usability

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Illustration by Dennis Harms

Related links:

sidebar: Design Lucid Software With The User In Mind

sidebar: Put Flawed Software To The Test

PDF file: Point-Of-Sale Interface Mock-Up
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Interface design helps you choose graphical components, such as checkboxes and dialogs, and use them to their best advantage. But issues such as checkboxes are far down the path from the basic interaction design of the application. Interface design is a small subset of interaction design.

Intuitive Design
Disciplines such as psychology and cognitive science play key roles in interaction design, in much the same way they are central to the design of common household objects. Don Norman, founding chairman of the department of cognitive science at the University of California at San Diego, spent an entire chapter in his book The Design of Everyday Things (Doubleday Books, 1990) discussing door handles. Specifically, he examined how the shape and placement of door handles suggest whether the door should be pushed, pulled, or slid. He goes on to show that poorly designed or poorly placed handles cause confusion in users who will frequently push when they should pull or otherwise mishandle the simple task of opening a door. What is true for a common door is doubly true for software: Design needs to be intuitive.

The best way for IT managers to begin building usability into their applications is to develop the right team. According to Charles Kreitzberg, president of Cognetics Corp., a leading interaction-design firm in Princeton Junction, N.J., the team should consist of usability designers and testers, developers, users, and someone from marketing. Because no university offers a major in usability design, most experts have backgrounds in psychology or cognitive science, he says.

All members should participate fully in discussions surrounding the design. Kreitzberg points out that developers are initially resistant to this process, especially if they were involved in the original design of the application's interface. However, when developers can see the results of surveying users about how they interact with the software, they tend to get excited about the changes.

Andy Mallinger, the director of product management for InstallShield Corp., a company that specializes in installation wizards for third-party software, brought user research to the company. Once the developers saw that users applied the software in ways that hadn't been anticipated, they quickly embraced interaction design and usability testing. "It has revolutionized our product by making it easier to use," Mallinger says.

The first step is learning how customers use the existing product. If good data is captured, then all decisions about the design and implementation will flow naturally. From the data, the interaction designers should fashion a mock-up of the interface. Interestingly, this step is often done on paper to minimize the development time of a prototype that is likely to change many times. Every screen the user will encounter is drawn and redrawn, until a consensus is reached on the design. Once agreement is reached, the design phase winds down, development begins in earnest, and usability testing starts up.

Testing At Any Cost
Testing the usability of designs and software implementations has been practiced for a long time. Microsoft first introduced usability testing in the late 1980s. It caught on so quickly that it became a required part of all design work and at every level of implementation. Today, Microsoft employs more than 100 usability specialists in 28 laboratories. Usability testing's inroads into business IT departments is new, however, and a function of the Web's incursion into business computing.

Some companies have extensive facilities comparable to Microsoft's; others opt initially for a minimal testing regimen. The bottom line is that companies that invest in design need to follow up with some form of usability testing.

Once a paper design is fashioned, representative users are assembled and asked to perform a specific task. They point to the place on the paper where they would normally click. The tester then reaches into the paper slides, finds the one with the drop-down menu, for example, presents it to the user, and waits for the user to select an item. The user then points to a menu entry and waits while the tester finds the screen mock-up for the entry. This process repeats itself until the user has completed the task or given up in frustration. Throughout this process, the user expresses comments, questions, and concerns about the product's use. These comments are taped and studied.

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