Category: Usability

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From napkin to Five Sketches™

In 2007, a flash of insight hit me, which led to the development of the Five Sketches™ method for small groups who need to design usable software. Looking back, it was an interesting journey.

The setting. I was working on a two-person usability team faced with six major software- and web products to support. We were empowered to do usability, but not design. At the time, the team was in the early stages of Nielsen’s Corporate Usability Maturity model. Design, it was declared, would be the responsibility of the developers, not the usability team. I was faced with this challenge:

How to get usable products
from software- and web developers
by using a method that is
both reliable and repeatable.

The first attempt. I introduced each development team to the usability basics: user personas, requirements, paper prototyping, heuristics, and standards. Some developers went for usability training. In hindsight, it’s easy to see that none of this could work without a formal design process in place.

The second attempt. I continued to read, to listen, and to ask others for ideas. The answer came as separate pieces, from different sources. For several months, I was fumbling in the metaphorical dark, having no idea that the answer was within reach. Then, after a Microsoft product launch on Thursday, 18 October, 2007, the light went on. While sitting on a bar stool, the event’s guest speaker, GK Vanpatter, mapped out an idea for me on a cocktail napkin:

  1. Design requires three steps.
  2. Not everyone is comfortable with each of those steps.
  3. You have to help them.
Some key design ideas, conveyed to me on a napkin sketch in a Vancouver bar.

The quadrants are the conative preferences or preferred problem-solving styles.

I recognised that I already had an answer to step 3, because I’d heard Bill Buxton speak at the 2007 UPA conference, four months earlier. I could help developers be comfortable designing by asking them to sketch.

It was more easily said than done. Everyone on that first team showed dedication and courage. We had help from a Vancouver-based process expert who skilfully debriefed each of us and then served us a summary of remaining problems to iron out. And, when we were done, we had the beginnings of an ideation-and-design method.

Since then, it’s been refined with additional teams of design participants, and it will be refined further—perhaps changed significantly to suit changing circumstances. But that’s the story of the first year.

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Functional sophistication, not complexity

Some software companies add ever more features to their software as a way to differentiate it from its competitors. Lucinio Santos’ lengthy analysis of sophistication versus complexity includes this graphic:

functional-sophistication-not-complexity

An excellent example of simplification is the Microsoft Office ribbon. Many users who upgrade dislike the ribbon for months because of the sheer amount of GUI change it imposes, but the ribbon successfully simplifies and makes existing features more discoverable.

Incidentally, the Office ribbon was designed by a design team using generative design. I facilitated a ribbon-design project that used a team of developers Five Sketches™—a method that incorporates a generative design.

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Blended usability approach “best”

I received a brochure in the mail, titled Time for a Tune-up: How improving usability can improve the fortunes of your web site. It recommends this blend of usability methods:

  • A blended approachExpert reviews focus on workflows and give best results when the scope is clearly defined.
  • Usability studies are more time-consuming than expert reviews, but is the best way to uncover real issues.
  • Competitor benchmarking looks at the wider context.

The brochure is written by online-marketing consultants, and with Web sites in mind, but its content is also relevant to other development activities.

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Effectiveness of usability evaluation

Do you ever wonder how effective expert reviews and usability tests are? Apparently, they can be pretty good.

Rolf Molich and others have conducted a series of comparative usability evaluation (CUE) studies, in which a number of teams evaluate the same version of a web site or application. The teams chose their own preferred methods—such as an expert review or a usability test. Their reports were then evaluated and compared by a small group of experts.

What the first six CUE studies found

About 30% of reported problems were found by multiple teams. The remaining 70% were found by a single team only. Fortunately, of that 70%, only 12% were serious problems. In one CUE study, the average number of reported problems was 9, so a team would be overlooking 1 or 2 serious problems. The process isn’t perfect, but teams found 80% or more of the serious problems.

Teams that used usability testing found more usability problems than expert reviewers. However, expert reviewers are more productive-they found more issues per hour-as this graph from the fourth CUE study illustrates:

CUE study 4 results

Teams that found the most usability problems (over 15 when the average was 9) needed much more time than the other teams, as illustrated in the above graph. Apparently, finding the last few problems takes up the most time.

The CUE studies do not consider the politics of usability and software development. Are your developers sceptical of usability benefits? Usability studies provide credibility-boosting video as visual evidence. Are your developers using an Agile method? Expert reviews provide quick feedback for each iteration.

To learn more about comparative usability evaluation, read about the findings of all six CUE studies.