Page 1 of 1 Usability is one of those issues, much like security, that everyone says is so important, how it needs to be a focus in their next project. Unfortunately, more often than not, it falls by the wayside to be replaced by aggressive deadlines, poor site/application designs, and angry users. Usability should be given more than a passing thought before, during, and after your project plan. With the proper plan, you can ensure that your end users will have a pleasant experience using your product.
I've had the pleasure of working with someone whose entire job is to do nothing but ensure that usability is at the forefront of a project. Her name is Lani Hathaway, and she is a usability engineer.
Lani Hathaway: I work at Electronic Arts, the biggest game publisher in the world. The studio I work for makes EA Sports video games such as Madden Football, NCAA Football, NASCAR and NFL Street. I went to school at the University of Washington and graduated with a Master's in Technical Communication. I studied things like human computer interaction, multimedia design, interface design, online communities, virtual reality systems, oh, and of course--usability testing. After school I worked at a sports Internet company and became a dot-bomb casualty. I consulted for a while getting to work on things like the Boeing Connexion project, which put broadband Internet connections on planes. I broke into the games industry in 2002 doing usability consulting at Microsoft Games Studios.
I performed my first usability test about seven years ago and have been doing usability-related projects ever since. Once I started doing usability and seeing how user centered design could help improve products, I knew that's what I wanted to do.
Usability engineers are the jack-of-all trades so to speak. Part researcher, part planner, part designer, part evangelist, part cheerleader. A day-in-the-life varies depending on what roles are required for the task at hand, but here are some typical activities:
The job also changes if you're a consultant as opposed to being a full-time employee. As a consultant, you do a lot more homework: research, design, and making presentations for clients. You have to be very good at scoping projects, scheduling, budgeting/estimating, and jumping from problem-set to problem-set (small biz website to multi-million dollar games for example).
Google is at the top of my list. Its main function--searching--is still the focal point of the home page, which is pretty impressive. How many meetings do you think they've had where someone has proposed something new for the home page? :)
I'm also an Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) fan. How many times have you said, "Gee, I wish I could remember the name of that actor, you know the one in that one movie about the three criminals" or "Do you remember the one lady who played opposite Jack Nicholson in that movie, oh what was the name of it?" You can seriously get answers to questions like these because their search feature allows you to search the plot of the movie along with the title, cast, characters in the movie, and more. The website is a textbook example of how to use hypertext--everything is categorized and linked, yet searchable by keyword. It's great! I always find the movie-related answers I am looking for.
I'm not big on knocking poor products because their customers probably do it enough already. Every time I use a bad website, I leave if it doesn't work for me. If I'm not satisfied with a product, I'll take it back. There are usually plenty of competitors or other ways for me to get what I want. I guess I'd have to say the websites where the design is poor and there's no alternative for accomplishing my task are the ones that score lowest in my book. For example, some of the government websites you wish you could leave, but then you realize they don't have any competition and the way they want you to do the task offline is even worse than doing it online (standing in line for how long? the office is open only until 5pm, but I work until 7:00, ugh!).
Let's take the social security website for example: http://www.ssa.gov/. I get statements in the mail from time to time indicating the amount of money I've saved toward social security. So why can't I just type in my social security number and some verification information (date of birth, mother's maiden name, etc.) and see what the status of my account is? Instead they insist I put all my precious private information into a long form and wait 2-4 weeks for a paper statement to be snail-mailed to me. Unbelievable!! Check out this poorly designed form (Click Request a Statement button at bottom): https://s044a90.ssa.gov/apps6/isss/Controller
On websites, I see a lot of search-related issues, such as users not being able to find the information they are looking for or not categorizing information the same way the website organizes things. We do card sorting before designing the information architecture and navigation to see how users naturally group items. In games, users like to be in control of their experience so if they don't feel they are creating or heavily impacting their destiny, they can become frustrated. In games, we let users skip in-game movies, do self-paced tutorials and let them go for help when they need it. Also, we try not to over-assist users with the AI; we try to balance the game so that it has an appropriate level of challenge for our targeted users.
Terminology is huge in any product; lots of products don't speak the user's language. Different industries and organizations speak their own language so sometimes cryptic or organization-specific words creep into their products. Screens, content and widgets should be labeled from the user's perspective, e.g., "Play Online" not "Online Play." It's a subtle difference, but unfamiliar or funny-sounding terminology trips people up all the time. Imagine if the sentence was more complicated, like "Windows-based file system map" instead of "View a map of your documents and files" The latter tells a user what they can do with it, not just what it is. Unnecessary technical details (in this case, "Windows-based") should be left out.
If you have a current product, I would suggest running a listening lab, or a usability test where you sit alongside a user and see if they can figure out what to do with your product. Have them talk out loud while they are exploring. This should be very eye-opening if you've never done it before. Be sure to get someone who has not yet used your product. The marketing guy down the hall doesn't count! During the test, shush and just listen. Not talking or responding to what the user is saying is truly the hardest part of doing the usability test. Do go into serious listening mode and use neutral prompts ("mm-hmmm," "okay") to reassure the person you're listening closely. If you have another person on the team, bring them to listen and take notes unobtrusively in the background. That way you don't have to write madly while sitting right next to the user, which can be distracting to them. I also suggest doing a listening lab with any competitive products.
If your product is not yet built try testing a paper prototype. Sketch out your screens on paper. Don't worry about doing any visual design or HTML prototypes just yet. Just get the main content on paper and put the screens in the right order. Bring in a user to do some typical tasks, one at a time, with your product. Instruct them to point their finger where they'd normally click their mouse, and tell them that you'll be the "computer." As the computer, you'll take them to the correct screen when they "click" something.
The tasks you give users to do should be things you feel are critical to someone successfully using your product. For example, if I was usability-testing a travel website, then a critical task might be for users to find and book a flight using the "book a flight" tab on the interface. After I have a list of tasks, I write a scenario for each task, or a story to make the task easy-to-understand and more realistic for the user. For example, the story for my find-a-flight task might read, "Pretend you just got married and want to go to Aruba on your honeymoon. Book a roundtrip plane ticket leaving on November 8th and returning on November 20th." Notice I didn't say "book a flight" because I didn't want to lead the user to choosing that specific tab on the interface. Again, have users talk out loud while they are doing the tasks. You'll learn a lot more that way!!
WebCat (card-sorting software), Pencil and Paper, Excel, Word, Outlook, Project, Visio, PowerPoint
Well, Flash is good and bad. Flash enables developers to create some very usable, elegant web applications. It enables people with little or no programming background to create things that would normally need programming expertise. However, it's still a barrier to some people. For example, those on slow connections who don't want to wait for the browser plug-in to download, those who are just plain afraid to trust content from corporations over the Internet, or those who just get annoyed by Flash intros and don't want to use it.
The thing that bugs me personally about Flash is that you can't use the browser's "back" button in conjunction with its proprietary small web file. When a user clicks back, the application starts over again from the beginning. This is highly disruptive to the usual web surfing experience because users are used to clicking "back" to return to the previous screen. We are creatures of habit and Flash doesn't cater to this one very ingrained navigation habit.
Usability is more than just making something easy-to-use and efficient. It's about pleasing users. Visual design can be just as important as good navigation, search and information hierarchy when it comes to pleasing users. If the visual design is not up to par then users will likely complain.
Take usability into your own hands! Start now by making a prototyping and usability testing plan for your product. Get out there and interview potential customers of your product. Interviews usually help us get to know our users better and get intimately familiar with their goals. Let's face it...most people use things for a reason — and most goals can be met in more ways than one. For example, if I want to keep in touch with my family back in Seattle I can pick up the phone, I can email them, write in a weblog, send them photos from my camera phone, send them an e-card and so on. There are tons of ways to reach my goal, so the designer of a new product or website had better be familiar with how I'm already reaching that goal, what my problems are with the current products, and be thinking of ways to support my current behaviors. Once you know who you're designing for and why (what their goals are), it's a lot easier to design a good user experience. When you design, bring in users to get feedback on paper prototypes, early mockups and, later, working prototypes and final builds of your product. Track the issues you discover and fix due to usability-related activities. After you release your product, do customer satisfaction surveys and benchmark usability tests. Get user feedback every step of the way and then act on it!
If you would like to ask Lani a question regarding this article, you may email her at: lhathaway@ea.com
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Keywords
interview usability study usable card sorting webcat electronic arts
