Category: Best practices

Posted on

Poor usability is a form of tech debt

If you’ve worked in software development for a while, you may have noticed that work to address poor usability gets postponed more often than work on new features and functions. But this need not be an either/or proposition.

Postponed usability work – whether it’s identified by your customers or your user researcher – can be seen as a form of tech debt. It typically accumulates with every release.

Bike-tire pumpWhat contributes to this accumulation?

  • Poor timing or process. Some usability issues aren’t identified until after the product is released.
  • Pressure to get to market. There’s often pressure to leap ahead or catch up with competitors by adding new features and functions immediately.
  • Perceived relative value. If multiple teams compete for a share of development resources, a new feature may attract more funding than tech debt.

There is a path to a more usable product, at a low-to-moderate cost and with low-to-moderate risk. With every release, take some of the following actions.

Continue reading “Poor usability is a form of tech debt”
Posted on

An expert review using heuristics versus a usability study

User researchers like to see products in the hands of users, and they like to analyse quantitative and qualitative data. But they also use heuristic methods, such as expert reviews, done without a user in sight.

A checklist of heuristicsExpert reviews are a shortcut that rely on a usability analyst’s expertise to identify gaps in a product when compared to a set of guidelines or heuristics.

You may have come across these heuristics:

  • Jakob Nielsen’s 10 general principles for interaction design.
  • The Agile manifesto’s principles, which also apply to software usability.
  • Jeremy Lyon’s five visual design principles that reinforce the software’s use and meaning.
  • A corporate style guide that sets out how to reinforce a brand’s visual presence.

I decided to use Lyon’s five visual-design principles to assess an online app that I worked on with a team of developers and user-interface designers. Would the expert review contradict or complement the findings of our usability research on the same product? Continue reading “An expert review using heuristics versus a usability study”

Posted on

Divergent thinking can make better software

If your development team wants to build genuinely new features or services that are innovative or “outside the box”, how would you do it?

In broad strokes, often there’s an initial design discussion to map the project requirements to a sensible idea. Then there may be a proof of concept to test any risky parts. Finally the team develops the idea into a solution, and tests it. This overall approach uses convergent thinking to identify a solution.

Would it surprise you to know this approach is firmly inside the proverbial box, and less likely to lead to a genuinely new or innovative solution?

Continue reading “Divergent thinking can make better software”