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Users are not used to it

For several years, I did usability testing on CAD-style software that was full of legacy code, some of which preceded Windows 98.

Some of that legacy code dealt with CAD objects that displayed on screen. To work with these objects, users had a choice of menu commands and toolbar buttons, supplemented by dialog boxes. For example, to move an object, users could not simply click and drag it; they would choose a command, click the object, and then, in a dialog box, enter the distance to move the object.

That’s the way CAD programs worked when that legacy code was originally written.

Over the years, during my usability testing of various features, I noticed a growing trend toward direct manipulation. That is, to work with an object, users would try to click it or drag it. They would do this without thinking. Even long-time users, faced with a new feature (studies from 2005-2006), would try direct manipulation first:

  • 100% of the test subjects clicked a cube, trying to select it.
  • 100% of the test subjects dragged a point or line, trying to move it.
  • 100% of the test subjects clicked in the window, trying to create a point.
  • 100% dragged across points, trying to select them.

But the new features were built on the legacy code, so had the command-driven interaction style. A simple click on the object was usually a dead end for users.

And the users would say: “Darn,” and then look for another vector—another pathway—to complete the task.

The reasons we didn’t provide direct manipulation:

  • “Our users are used to the way it is now.” Clearly, usability-test results negated that argument. Users are not so accustomed to old-style interaction, because their first instinct for new CAD tasks in an existing product was direct manipulation.
  • “There’s not enough bang for the buck” because the opportunity cost (the cost of skipping other possible projects) was deemed too great. It’s hard to argue with this, as a usability analyst. The company opted for more features, and may have increased its risk of being leapfrogged by the competition, as discussed in an earlier blog.
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Your usability advantage

When businesses buy software, rather than choose the software with the lowest purchase price, they ought to consider the total cost of ownership—including the added productivity and enjoyment that usability and user-experience provide.

Every software company will say “our product is usable,” so how can you prove to prospective customer that you’ve really got usability?

Your product has a usability advantage if:

  1. Your development team’s motivation is right. Software meets customer business needs if came out of a design and development process that considers stakeholders beyond the development team.

    2. Incidentally, getting the motivation right is what Five Sketches™ was designed to help development teams to do.

  2. Trials quickly reveal product effectiveness. In a hands-on trial, you want users to try common tasks, figure them out, and say they liked the experience. A good hands-on trial reduces a competitor’s vendor demo to an infomercial.
  3. It’s about information more than data. Data requires cognitive transformation in the user’s head to become information. Information is ready now to support insight and appropriate action.
  4. Change management is minimal. Your mental model is clearly evident and the user experience is pleasant, so resistance to change is lower. Employees will see evidence of leadership rather than another “solution” imposed on them.
  5. Your training teaches skills. Pick one: training that leads users through a maze (an unusable-interface), or training that teaches users smarter ways to work toward their goals.
  6. You have metrics. If you tell customers how long it will take new users to start performing, you show your respect for their total cost of ownership.
  7. You have references. A product reference is as close as a Google search. In a web-2.0 world, your best “reference” could be an engaged, loyal user community.

The first 4½ to 5 points, above, require the Development team’s involvement, and the last few benefit from Dev involvement. Clearly, a usability advantage requires the involvement of other departments, directed by a product manager who works the Marketing, Sales, Support, and Development teams in concert. :)

This post was inspired by a Howard Hambrose article in Baseline Magazine, which recommends that IT professionals question software usability before they buy and implement.

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Heuristics at the design stage

On the IxDA’s discussion list for interaction designers, Liam Greig posted his “human friendly” version of a heuristics checklist based on Nielson’s originals and the ISO’s ergonomics of human-system interactions.

Here are  just the headings and the human-friendly questions, which are useful at a project’s design stage.

A design should be…

  • transparent. Ask: Where am I? What are my options?
  • responsive. Ask: What is happening right now? Am I getting what I need?
  • considerate. Ask: Does this make sense to me?
  • supportive. Ask: Can I focus on my task? Do I feel frustrated?
  • consistent. Ask: Are my expectations accurate?
  • forgiving. Ask: Are mistakes easy to fix? Does the technology blame me for errors?
  • guiding. Ask: Do I know where to go for help?
  • accommodating. Ask: Am I in control? Am I afraid to make mistakes?
  • flexible. Ask: Can I customize my experience?
  • intelligent. Ask: Does the technology know who I am? Did the technology remember the way I left things?

Sometimes, at the analysis end of a Five Sketches™ ideation-design session, the design participants see more than one path forward. Use heuristics to frame the discussion of how each path rates, to reach a decision faster.

The heuristics can be about more than just usability. You can also assess coding costs, maintenance costs, code stability…. And, of course, you must also assess potential designs against the project’s requirements.

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Designing *with* developers

Today, Joel Spolsky blogged about development process and design. He makes a couple of points I agree with. As an example, he says that developers don’t know how to do everything. He says it first by describing his lack of skills in an early job at Microsoft, and later by describing the lack of skills in very experienced developers:

Joel SpolskyYour garden-variety super-smart programmer is going to come up with a completely baffling user interface that makes perfect sense IF YOU’RE A VULCAN (cf. git). The best programmers are notoriously brilliant, and have some trouble imagining what it must be like not to be able to memorize 16 one-letter command line arguments. These programmers then have a tendency to get attached to their first ideas, especially when they’ve already written the code.

At this point, reading Spolsky’s blog, I’m like the eager school kid with his hand up: “Oh, oh, I know the answer!” Five Sketches™ was specifically developed to prevent the people-attached-to-their-first-ideas problem and to ensure collaboration between developers and other members of the team.

Software products are developed by teams, but, as Spolsky goes on to say—about developers—some team members have more power those who work alongside them, because developers control the code. He tells this story:

Joel Spolsky       A programmer asks me to intervene in some debate he is having with a [non-developer peer; in this story it’s a Program Manager who performs a design function].
       “Who is going to write the code?” I asked.
       “I am….”
       “OK, who checks things into source control?”
       “Me, I guess, ….”
       “So what’s the problem, exactly?” I asked. “You have absolute control over the state of each and every bit in the final product. What else do you need? A tiara?”

Spolsky’s solution is to rely on the ability of others [in this case, the Program Manager] to convince the developer to make necessary changes. But requiring stakeholders and colleagues to engage in persuasion is risky; the variables include not only technical skill and experience, but also credibility, and rhetoric, persuasion, and interpersonal communication skills of both parties.

I recall when we first developed our ideation-design process, on an interdisciplinary team. We had Sharon to debrief each of us, to find out what had worked and what hadn’t, and then we addressed the shortcomings and frustrations in the process. This is how we developed Five Sketches™. And this is why it works … with developers … and with people from QA, Marketing, Tech-Comm, and so on.

By the way, you can read Joel Spolsky’s entire blog post here.

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Customers can’t do your job

Agile methodology can produce usable products, as long as you know what you’re doing. A common pitfall in agile is this incorrect assumption that you’ll get a usable product simply by building what the client tells you to build.

When there is some question about how to make a feature usable, customers may have something to say, but their answers are more likely based on opinion and emotion rather than on design experience and behavioural observation.

Brazilian blogger and computer-science- and HCI expert, Francisco Trindade, gives this illustration: If you had asked people how they would like to search for Web pages in the pre-Google era, how many would have asked for a blank page with a text box on it…?

Can customers design? Probably not.Trindade says that, regardless of whether this ask-the-client behaviour is laziness or a responsibility-avoidance strategy, people who design software need to “stop pretending that the client has all the answers, and trust a little bit more in themselves to create solutions.”

Creating solutions? That’s a job for developers and the Five-Sketches™ method, or any other design method they’re comfortable with.

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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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Failure, then sketching success

Developing Five Sketches™ came with its share of challenges. Fortunately, all obstacles were overcome. Some of those obstacles were even on the official Ways To Fail list in Seth Godin’s book, The Big Moo.

I’m glad I didn’t have to face them all:

  • Keep swimmingKeep secrets.
  • Set aggressive deadlines for others to get buy in—then change them when they aren’t met.
  • Be certain you’re right and ignore those who disagree with you.
  • Resist testing your theories.
  • Focus more on what people think and less on whether your idea is as good as it could be.
  • Assume that a critical mass must embrace your idea for it to work.
  • Choose an idea where the preceding point is a requirement.
  • Assume that people who don’t instantly get your idea are bullheaded, shortsighted, or even stupid.
  • Don’t bother to dramatically increase the quality of your presentation style.
  • Insist that you’ve got to go straight to the president of the organisation to get something done.
  • Always go for the big win.

Of course this is only funny in retrospect, now that I can see my way through any design challenge. Swimmingly.

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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.