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April 2, 2001

RADICAL SIMPLICITY
Remember The User's Point Of View

Hard-to-handle applications can frustrate customers and cost sales

By Aaron Ricadela (aricadel@cmp.com)

Illustration by Nicholas Wilton

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hen banking-software developer Metavante Corp. wanted to roll out a new graphical back-office application to 650 mainframe customers, its engineers were able to pinpoint users' trouble spots and streamline the product plans before writing a single line of code. The kicker? Metavante's method. The IT subsidiary of $1.75 billion bank Marshall & Illseley Corp., whose customers include Bank of America and FleetBoston Financial Corp., attacked the problem with paper and pencil.

Welcome to the era of usability science. After consulting with expert Jared Spool, founding principal of research firm User Interface Engineering, Metavante engineers visited customers' sites, drew up a list of the top-10 tasks workers used the mainframe for, and sketched a prototype Windows interface on sheets of paper. Working in teams, users walked through common tasks such as opening an account or changing a payment date. One person played the "user," pretending to click on buttons and fill in fields by pointing to the sketches. Another played the computer, holding up sheets of paper with various screens drawn on them as the "user" cycled through the new program's functions.

The engineers learned that customers were logging on to three mainframe systems to perform even simple tasks. They responded with a graphical user interface that corrals data from the three systems into a single application, which the company is rolling out now. "If we didn't actually go out and test with the customers and work with prototypes, there would really be no way to guess at what the problems would be," says Susan Hawkins, manager of product design and usability at Metavante, in Milwaukee. The company saved months of work by eliminating expensive changes to the code after the app was deployed and by cutting down on customer-service calls. "Too often, we deliver what the technology can do, vs. what customers need it to do," Hawkins says.

Not all IT shops, commercial software vendors, or Web-site developers are tuned in to designing the best possible interface, but experts say they ought to be. The stakes are higher than ever for IT managers: The rise of E-business means that poorly designed software doesn't just irritate employees or slow productivity anymore--it can cost sales. "For IT managers, the Web has made things far more complex," Spool says.

The evidence is everywhere. Compressed software-development cycles make early feedback from users more important but less likely to happen. The Web's sprawling nature means IT shops often lack an accurate picture of their apps' eventual users--who may be customers, employees, partners, or the simply curious. Just as important, integration between an application's user interface and its back-end data-processing portions has moved to the fore of usability concerns. One example: A user error on a simple name-and-address form often returns another blank form--a big turnoff to Web patrons.

And the browsing experience is getting worse, as Microsoft and AOL Time Warner's Netscape division add more buttons to their browser software and as advertisers stick in more pop-up ads. "The Internet has taken usability and set it back 10 years," says Donald Norman, a principal at usability consulting firm Nielsen-Norman Group and a former executive at Apple Computer and Hewlett-Packard. "If you want to bring in more income, you don't do it by annoying people."

A study of public Web sites by User Interface Engineering shows that even on the best sites, people find what they're looking for only about 42% of the time. "That's an 'F' grade," says Spool, and it's far worse than success rates for packaged software. Kent Sullivan, a usability manager for desktop Windows at Microsoft, says monthly benchmarks show that users of Windows 98, 2000, and ME are successful a little more than 60% of the time in accomplishing a list of 30 key tasks, ranging from simple actions such as opening and saving files to complex tasks such as manipulating digital photos and music.

Microsoft aims to raise that rate to 75% in Windows XP, the desktop operating system it's developing, via a cleaner desktop interface, better adaptability to users' habits, and more-intuitive ways of organizing files. One measure of the project's importance: This week in Seattle, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates plans to talk about the company's usability efforts and new software interfaces in a keynote to the Association for Computing Machinery's Computer-Human Interface conference.

The notion of usable software has come a long way since the days when mainframe and Unix systems predominated and designers' attitude was "If you're having trouble, why are you using this software anyway?"

What's It Worth To You? Usability and ergonomics emerged nearly a century ago with the industrial time-and-motion studies of the early 1900s. The military, too, has had a long-standing interest in the field. In the late 1970s, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center incorporated usability concepts into the interface for its experimental Star computer. And Apple Computer's Macintosh machines, which borrowed from PARC's work, showed many businesses the commercial value of easier-to-use interfaces. As for Microsoft: It took five years, until 1990, to make Windows widely usable. But the company bombed with Microsoft Bob, a simplified interface that debuted in 1996, overlaying the Windows desktop with animated objects.

While experts contend that much packaged software still isn't up to snuff, E-business continues to change the rules of application design, demanding that businesses keep improving their software.

A few years ago, Hewlett-Packard's Web site was a patchwork of pages hosted by various HP divisions, each with its own look and without common standards for navigation or data access. "We looked like 50 companies," says Lynne Baldwin, customer experience manager at HP.com. Customers complained, too, so HP redesigned its HP.com site to emphasize simpler navigation and what Baldwin calls "contextual navigation." This means that when visitors click on a tech-support link from a page about printers--or even about a specific model--they'll go to the support page for that category or product, instead of to tech support's home page. HP also banned tech-speak, replacing references to "peripherals" with "printers," for example.