Design, process, business – Page 8 – Usability research and analysis

26 March 200926 March 2009

Usability testing distant users

When a product’s users are scarce and widely dispersed, and your travel budget is limited, usability testing can be a challenge.

Remote testing from North America was part of the answer, for me. I’ve never used UserVue because the users I needed to reach were in Africa, Australia, South America, and Asia—continents that UserVue doesn’t reach. Even within North America, UserVue didn’t address the biggest problems I faced:

My study participants commonly face restrictive IT policies, so they cannot install our pre-release product and prerequisites.
I need to prevent study participants from risking their data by using it with a pre-release product.
There’s no way to force an uninstall after the usability test. Who else will see our pre-release?

Instead, I blended a solution of my own with Morae, Skype, Virtual Audio Cable, and GoToMeeting. I Testing that's really remote used GoToMeeting to share my desktop, which addresses all three of the problems listed above. I used Skype to get video and audio. I used Virtual Audio Cable to redirect the incoming voice from Skype to Morae Recorder’s microphone channel. Morae recorded everything except the PIP video. It worked. However, my studies were sometimes limited by poor Internet bandwidth to the isolated locations of my study participants.

Amateur facilitators. I realise this is controversial among usability practitioners, but beggars in North America can’t be choosers about how they conduct usability tests on other continents. I developed a one-hour training session for the team of travelling product managers. Training included a short PowerPoint presentation about the concepts, followed by use of Morae Recorder with webcam and headset while role-playing in pairs. The main points I had to get across:

Between study participants, reset the sample data and program defaults.
When you’re ready to start recording, first check that the video and audio are in focus and recording.
While you facilitate, do not lead the user. Instead, try paraphrasing and active listening (by which I mean vernacular elicitation). Remember that you’re not training the users, so task failure is acceptable, and useful to us.

I had a fair bit of influence over the quality of the research, since I developed the welcome script and test scenarios, provided the sample data, and analysed the Morae recordings once they arrived in North America. Due to poor Internet bandwidth to the isolated areas of my study participants, the product managers had to ship me the Morae recordings on DVD, by courier.

It worked. I also believe that amateur facilitation gave the product managers an additional opportunity to learn about customers.

25 March 200927 March 2009

Why products stay pre-chasm

I’ve spent some time working with legacy products—software for which the core code was written before “usability” was a term developers had heard of, back when developers were still called programmers.

I remember my first conversation—held last century—with a developer about his users and the usability of his legacy product. The product-adoption curve, with the chasm I used Geoffrey Moore’s book, Crossing the chasm, to introduce the idea that there are different types of users. The chasm (illustrated) shows five groups of users. The area under the curve represents the quantity of potential users, in the order in which they will typically adopt the product. Users who are technology enthusiasts and visionaries either enjoy or don’t mind being on the bleeding edge because of the benefits they get from using the product, according to Moore. Usability isn’t one of the typical benefits to the left of the chasm, where new products are first introduced. Wider adoption follows only after the product is made to cross the chasm—but this takes a concerted effort on the part of the development team.

What delays a product from crossing the chasm?

Revenues that are sufficient to let the company putter along.
Team members who themselves are tech enthusiasts or visionaries. This occurs, for example, when a nutritionist who also knows how to program develops software for nutritionists.
Team members who have infrequent exposure to newer user experiences. This could include someone who still uses Microsoft Office 2003, eschews social-networking applications on the web, or uses Linux.
Product managers whose roles are weakly defined or absent, making it more likely that new features get developed for the technical challenge of it, rather than for the user need or the business strategy.
Sales reps who ask for more functions in the product in order to make a sale—and a development culture that goes along with this.
Managers whose vision and strategic plan leave out user experience and usability.
Team members who have been on the team for decades.
Organisations that don’t use business cases to help them decide where to apply business resources.
Organisations with poor change-management practices—because moving a product across the chasm is more likely dramatic and disruptive than smooth and gradual.
Designers who are weak or absent in the process, so that “design” happens on the fly, during development.

If you recognise your work environment or yourself in this list, do you want to change things? If you do, but don’t know how, what actions can you take to learn the answer?

24 March 200924 March 2009

Common tasks losing usability

There’s been a loss of usability for people who type text.

Like me, you may have experienced these unwelcome experiences:

After typing a long message in Facebook, when I click send, I get a page error and my entire message is lost.
After typing a post in WordPress, if the server has gone down or I press an unintended keyboard shortcut, I lose my entire post.

By comparison, if Word stops responding, it will (try to) offer me my unsaved changes when I reopen the document.

With users increasingly doing their work in browsers, why don’t browsers remember the text we were typing? Or why doesn’t the operating system? Or why doesn’t the weblication make backups? Or the server?

When my actions in a browser fail, imagine a message such as this:

This hints at just one possible solution. In the spirit of Five Sketches™, I bet you can come up with at least five more ways to support users after they’ve lost the work they typed in a browser.

23 March 200923 March 2009

Which user involvement works

User-centred design (UCD) advocated involving users in the design process. Have you wondered what form that user involvement could take, and which forms lead to the most successful outcomes?

I recently came across data that Mark Keil published a while ago. He surveyed software companies and correlated project outcomes with the type of user access that designers and developers had.

Type of contact with users		Effectiveness
	For custom software projects
	Facilitate teams, hold structured workshop with users, or use joint-application development (JAD).	██████████
	Expose users to a UI prototype or early version to uncover any UI issues.	██████
	Expose users to a prototype or early version to discover the system requirements.	████
	Hold one-on-one semi-structured or open-ended interviews with users.	████
	Test the product internally (acceptance testing rather than QA testing for bugs) to uncover new requirements.	██
	Use an intermediary to define user goals and needs, and to convey them to designers and developers.	██
	Collect user questions, requirements, and problems indirectly, by e-mail or online locations.	█
	For packaged or mass-market software projects
	Listen to live/synchronous phone support, tech-support, or help-desk calls.	████████
	Hold one-on-one semi-structured or open-ended interviews with users.	██████
	Expose users to a UI prototype or early version to uncover any UI issues.	████
	Convene a group of users, from time to time, to discuss usage and improvements.	████
	Expose users to a prototype or early version to discover the system requirements.	██
	Test the product internally (acceptance testing rather than QA testing for bugs) to uncover new requirements.	██
	Consult marketing and sales people who regularly meet with and listen to customers.	██
	At trade shows, show a mock-up or prototype to users and get their feedback.	█
Not reported as effective in this 1995 source
	Conduct a (text) survey of a sample of users.
	Conduct a usability test to “tape and measure” users in a formal usability lab. (This study precedes such products as TechSmith Morae.)
	Observe users for an extended period, or conduct ethnographic research.
	Conduct focus groups to discuss the software.

Although Keil’s article includes quantitative data, his samples are small. I opted to show only the relative usefulness of various methods. My descriptions, above, are long because the original article uses 1995 terms that have shifted in meaning. I believe some of the categories now overlap, due to changes in technology and method. For example, getting users to try a prototype of the UI in order to uncover UI issues sounds like the early usability testing that I do with TechSmith Morae, yet the 1995 results gave these activities very different effectiveness ratings.

For details, see the academic article by Mark Keil (Customer-developer links in software development). Educational publishers typically require a fee for access.

These methods also relate to research I’m doing on epistemology of usability analysis.

22 March 200922 March 2009

Are usability studies experiments?

When I conduct usability studies, I use a laptop and Morae to create a portable and low-cost usability lab. I typically visit the participant on site, so I can look around. I provide a scenario that participants can follow as they try using a new software feature. Morae records their voices, facial expressions, on-screen actions, clicks, and typing. The raw data gets saved in a searchable and graphable format. Afterward, I review the recorded data (I rarely have written notes) and make evidence-based recommendations to the feature’s project team.

For example, in one usability study I realised that the order of the steps was causing confusion and doubt. The three-step wizard would disappear after step, so users could modify their data on the screen. Users thought the task was completed with step 2, so the reappearance of the wizard for step 3 caused confusion. I recommended we change the order of the steps:

Change the order of the steps

Changing the order fixed the “confused users” problem. But was this scientific? Aside from the fact that I’m researching human subjects rather than test tubes, am I following a scientific model? At first glance, the usability test I conducted doesn’t seem to follow the positivist model of what constitutes an experiment:

A positivist model

For example, unlike the test-tube lab experiment of a chemist, my usability test had no control group. Also, my report went beyond factual conclusions to actual recommendations (based on my expert opinion) for the next iteration.

I can argue this both ways.

On the one hand, my usability test does have a control group if I take the next iteration of the product and repeat the usability test with additional participants, to see whether my recommendations solved the problem. I could compare the task-completion rates and the task duration.

A model of usability testing

On the other hand, if I were asked to determine whether the product has an “efficient” workflow or a “great” user experience—which are subjective measures—I’d say a positivist-model experiment is inappropriate. To measure a user’s confusion or satisfaction, I might consider their facial expressions, verbal utterances, and self-reported ratings. This calls for a research design whose epistemology is rooted in post-positivist, ethnomethodological, situated, standpoint, or critical approaches, and has more in common with research done by an ethnographer than by a chemist.

If you liked this, you may also like Epistemology of usability studies.

21 March 200920 March 2009

Internet Explorer leapfrogs Firefox?

Previously, I wrote about GUI—when to copy it and when to design it. When your competition has something better, I recommended you design, to leapfrog your competitor. Here’s an example of two competing web browsers:

At first glance, the new Internet Explorer 8 address bar looks like a copy of Firefox’s existing awesome bar, but click the image for an enlarged view. You’ll see that:

The on-the-fly suggestions are grouped as History and Favourites.
Each group lists only five items, by default.
To remove an item (think stale links and mistyped URLs), highlight the item and then click the × that appears.

Compared to Internet Explorer 7, Firefox had a better address bar. And just as clearly, the additional features of the Internet Explorer 8 address bar are an attempt to leapfrog Firefox. After the public has used IE8 for three months, it’ll be interesting to hear whether users think Microsoft succeeded.

Read the related post, GUI: Copy it or design it.

19 March 200921 March 2009

Epistemology of usability studies

Currently, I’m conducting research on usability analysis and on how Morae software might influence that. My research gaze is rather academic, in that I’m especially interested in the epistemology of usability analysis.

One of my self-imposed challenges is to make my research relevant to usability practitioners. I’m a practitioner and CUA myself, and I have little time for academic exercises because I work where the rubber hits the road. This blog post outlines what I’m up to.

At Simon Fraser University, I learned that epistemological approaches have different assumptions about what is knowable. On one side (below, left), it’s about numbers, rates, percentages, graphs, grids, tables, proving absolute truths. On the other side, (below, right) it’s about seeking objectivity while knowing that it’s impossible because everything has a cultural context. The epistemology you choose, when doing research, depends on what you believe. And the epistemology dictates what methods you use, and how you report your results.

You can be
certain of
what you know.

You cannot be
objective about
what you know.

Let’s look at some examples.

Study 1 fits with the view (above, left) that “you can be certain of what you know.” I plan and conduct a quantitative study to measure the time it takes a series of users to complete two common tasks in a software package: upgrading to the latest version of the software, and activating the software. I make appointments with users. In my workplace, I give each user a scenario and a computer. I observe them and time them as they complete the tasks by using the software package. My hope is that statistical analysis will give me results that I can report, including the average time on task with error bars, as the graph (right) illustrates.

Study 2 fits with the view (above, right) that “you cannot be objective about what you know” because all research takes place within a context. To lessen the impact of conducting research, I contact users to ask if I can study their workplace. I observe each user for a day. My hope is to analyse the materials and interaction that I’ve observed in context—complete with typical interruptions, distractions, and stimuli. Since a new software version has just been released, my hope is that I’ll get to observe them as they upgrade. I’ll report any usability issues, interaction-design hurdles, and unmet needs that I observe.

The above are compilations of studies I conducted.

Study 1 revealed several misunderstandings and installation problems, including a user who abandoned the installation process because he believed it was complete. I was able to report the task success rate and have the install wizard fixed.
Study 2 revealed that users write numbers on paper and then re-enter them elsewhere, which had not been observed when users visited our site for usability testing. One user told me: “I never install the latest version because the updates can be unstable,” and another said: “I only upgrade if there’s a fix for a feature I use” to avoid unexpected new defects. I was able to report the paper-based workaround and the users’ feelings about quality, for product managers to reflect in future requirements.

Clearly, there’s more than one way to conduct research, and not every method fits every team. That’s an idea that can be explored at length.

This has me wondering: which method fits what, when, where? Is there a relationship between a team’s development process and the approach to user research (epistemology) that it’s willing to embrace? …between its corporate usability maturity and the approach?

Those are two of the lines of inquiry in my research at Simon Fraser University.

If you liked this post, you may also like Are usability studies experiments?

18 March 200917 March 2009

Put the card in the slot

We know that human brains use patterns (or schemata) to figure out the world and decide what to do. This kind of cognitive activity takes place very quickly, which means we can react quickly to the world around us, as long as the pattern holds.

Here’s a pattern (or schema) that your brain may know: to put a card in a slot, use the narrow edge. If the card has a clipped corner, use that edge. Some examples:
clipped-cards-with-affordance
This pattern is easy for your brain because of the physical cues—also known as affordance. The narrow edge + clipped corner say: “This side goes in.”

A pattern that’s harder for your brain to learn is the magnetic-stripe bank card. You have to think about which way the stripe goes. And it seems harder when you’re in a hurry, or when you feel less safe. Have you used an outdoor bank machine at night, with people hanging around?

Vancouver transit tickets are awful because they don’t follow the card-in-the-slot pattern correctly. As a passenger on the SkyTrain (overhead subway line), you must punch your ticket at the station entrance. The machines are placed so you must turn your back on the drug dealers and their customers who hang out in the subway. As with bank cards, these transit tickets fit four ways, but only one will punch the ticket, and it’s not the edge with the clipped corner. There’s a yellow arrow to assist, but while the arrow is clearly visible in daylight, it’s almost invisible in the yellow-tinged fluorescent lighting of most SkyTrain stations. Also, the yellow arrow must be face down, which is counterintuitive because then you cannot see it. In the photo (above, right), can you find the arrow on the ticket?

Did the designers consider how their ticket machines or bank cards would make passengers feel? Designing for emotion seems to have legs, these days, but it’s not a new idea.

Doing better. I wonder whether the designers of these systems (transit tickets, bank cards) considered all possible options. It’s a Five Sketches™ mantra: You get a better design when you first saturate the design space. This can include doing a competitor analysis to seek out other ideas. And there are other models for transit tickets. I’ve seen Paris subway tickets with the magnetic stripe in the middle, so passengers could insert the ticket face up or face down, frontwards or backwards. The more recent tag-on/tag-off technology used from London, UK, to Perth, WA, avoids the insert-your-card problem—though the overall experience may be worse, since failure to tag off means paying the highest possible fare.

As for bank cards, IBM’s designers must have modelled bank cards on credit cards, which had the magnetic stripe toward the top instead of in the middle. This doubles the customer’s chances of inserting the card incorrectly. An obvious question to have asked at the design stage: can we design a bank machine to read the card regardless of how it’s inserted?

16 March 200926 March 2009

What “standard” GUI means

If you decide to forego the design stage and reuse or copy an existing GUI or interaction design, your life is easier.

But how do you know when you have a standard to follow?

An obvious place to find standards is in the precedents set by your own Development team. If your standards are not documented, consider a BarnRaising afternoon, once a month, until the high priority standards are documented.

And while many of us have enjoyed the comfort of a style guide to follow, there’s more flexibility now, as Milan Guenther wrote in Photos for interaction:

The barrier between web pages and desktop software is beginning to disappear, and modern rich client user interface technologies such as Silverlight/WPF, Air, or Java FX enables designers to take the control over the whole user experience of a software product. Style guides for operating systems like MacOS or Windows become less important because software products are available on multiple platforms, incorporating the same custom design independently from OS-specific style guides. Software companies and other parties involved begin to use the power of a distinct visual design to express both their brand identity and custom interactive design solutions to the users.

But not everything needs to be reinvented. There are plenty of common user tasks that the operating system supports with default GUI, including Open, Save, Print, Search/Replace, Font, Color, and Page Setup tasks. These also defaults serve as patterns for the custom GUI that you design—the visible objects, and the invisible ones, such as:

mental models
workflows

The two traditional operating systems give us plenty of standard controls to meet any design challenge, including buttons, boxes, sliders, progress indicators, notifications, and much more. If you develop for MacOS, Apple publishes various guidelines, including for user experience. If you develop for Windows, the Vista UX Guide is updated regularly, with new sections for ribbons, touch, pen, and printing.

sample-controls

Despite everything I just said about following standards, I’m also a big believer in changing things that are broken. An example: on my desk I can have two sheets of paper, copies of the same document. On my desk, they don’t need to have different names—even if each sheet has different comments written on it by different people. On my computer, the same two documents must either have different names or be in different folders. Surely the computer can keep track of both, uniquely, without forcing the user to choose different names? The unique-name requirement is an example of architecture dictating the interface. Alan Cooper wrote about this and other examples of tail wagging the dog in About Face: The essentials of user-interface design.

If you’re wondering when to copy/reuse, and when to design, check out my blog post, GUI: copy it or design it?

15 March 200913 May 2022

Generative design vs. Five Sketches™

© Leah Buley, from her presentation on SlideShare Leah Buley talked about generative design at the South by Southwest Interactive conference today [in March 2009]. Buley feels design methods are lacking in the set of professional tools we use for software development: “We don’t have so many good, reliable, repeatable design techniques.” I agree with her.

Buley tells how, in her first design session at Adaptive Path, she was handed a pen and paper, and told to sketch. The point was “to crank out a lot of ideas in a short time.” That’s what generative design is all about: saturating the design space with ideas. Design programs teach generative design, but there’s no generative design taught in programs for developers, QA staff, technical communicators, product management, or marketing.

There are already several design methods for software development teams to choose from, including Buley’s wonderful grab bag. Others I know of are Five Sketches™ (obviously) and Design Studio, both of which focus on the complete process of producing a design, start to finish, with all its challenges. Microsoft’s Bill Buxton told the UPA 2007 conference that he insists on generative design, and I’d love to see that in action. Each method differs slightly, but they all work because….

Why do they all work? Because of generative design. Generative design addresses what Buley calls her “dirty secret.” She freely confesses, about her design work before Adaptive Path: “I had very little confidence that what I was presenting as the design was in fact the one, optimal solution to the problem.” My experience teaching Five Sketches™ tells me that once you’ve participated in a generative-design process, you’ll know that you can have that confidence.

A related question: when will computer science programs teach Basic Design Methods to developers?