Interesting blog sites

Interesting blog of “Made by Many” about interactions and branding…
Take a look:

http://www.madebymany.co.uk/

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Design Guidelines from some interesting sources

I came across a post at the IxDA group talking about design guidelines guiding some of the big names in technology industry. Here are a few links:

* Luke W on Microsoft’s use of design principles:
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?796

* Google UX principles
http://www.google.com/corporate/ux.html

* Sony’s design philosophy
http://www.sony.net/Fun/design/profile/philosophy.html

A look at some important Usability Methods

This is an excerpt from one of the papers I wrote as part of my Evaluation of Systems and Services class. This excerpt takes a look at some of the important usability methods and my experiences with them. Here it is:

Overview:

This paper is a look back at the usability methods that were employed as part of the SI 622 “Evaluation of Systems and Services”course in Winter 2008. I was part of Team RENEU which also involved Gaurav Pimprikar, Anran Ye and Yung-Ju Chang. The team was involved in conducting a System Evaluation of Project Engage.

Project Engage:

University of Michigan Engage is intended to provide “one‐stop shopping” for people who want to help medicine move forward by participating in clinical research at the University of Michigan. Engage has several features ‐ study database, public search tool, community information, staff information, as well as a secure Registry. The original study database feature allows study teams here at University of Michigan to post their clinical research trials for the public to view. The Registry is an additional feature that allows interested volunteers to enroll in a registry, which automatically matches volunteers to potential studies, so that researchers can contact them as potential candidates. Medical Resources are also posted so the public can learn about the medical research that is going on at the University.

Our Work:

While Engage works well at facilitating UM clinical research staff’s manual work in finding volunteers, there are still many ways in which it could be improved, some of these may already been remarked upon by the users, while others still await discovery.

Our team completed a thorough exploration of the website structure using the Generalized Transition Network as well as compared it to other similar products used for volunteer solicitation. We have also completed numerous interviews and have been engaged in a focus group. Based on these experiences we have designed Personas of potential users of the website and scenarios that they may face. They have helped us get a better understanding of the users. This was followed by a Heuristic Evaluation using Jakob Nielson’s Heuristics. We also completed a survey by which we gathered useful user information and suggestions on the major improvements needed in the website. The Survey Analysis was followed by a very valuable User Testing. A large portion of the Engage Website is text‐based. Hence the language and textual elements used in the Interface play a very important role in how well the users understand and use the system. For this reason, our team conducted a Vocabulary analysis to analyze the appropriateness of the Vocabulary and Grammar used on the website. Finally, our some of our main findings and recommendations were consolidated into a presentation which was attended by our client and her development team.

Here is a list of the methods used to evaluate the website:

1. Generalized Transition Network

2. Personas and Scenarios

3. Comparative Evaluation

4. Heuristic Evaluation

5. Survey Analysis

6. User Testing

7. Vocabulary Analysis

In what follows, I am going to describe my experiences with each method in detail and suggest some positives and negatives for each.

Generalized Transition Network:

The generalized transition network is an essential tool from the usability perspective. It helps in understanding the system, its loop, paths, different features etc. The final artifact produced while being useful for usability personnel is also extremely informative for all the stakeholders and people involved with the system. The GTN gives a bird eye view of the system.

We found a lot of our issues like broken links, sections not connected etc. while building our GTN itself. The process of building the GTN familiarized us to all the intricacies of the system and helped us know and understand the system better. I feel that the GTN is most helpful when done as the first step in the usability process. It is more valuable before the contextual inquiry phase as you get clues for building your questions from your findings in the GTN. The process itself is time consuming and involves a considerable investment of effort and resources. The printing of the poster is a tad expensive and requires some skill in photoshop or other page layout/photo editing software.

Advantages:

– Familiarizes the team to the system and its intricacies.

– Provides a bird’s-eye- view of the concerned system.

– Can also help in identifying some low level issues.

Disadvantages:

– Time, effort and money consuming

– Requires some skills in page layout or photo editing software like Photoshop, illustrator etc.

Best Time to Perform: Before anything else in the usability process.

Artifact Produced: A poster containing the GTN

Personas and Scenarios:

Personas and Scenarios are tools which help in understanding the system’s users and imagining them using the system under various conditions. The information required to construct Personas and Scenarios is obtained by conducting a contextual inquiry regarding the system and its use. Interviews are conducted, in most cases with the users, and sometimes with other stakeholders to identify user population, demographics and way users use the system. The questions in these interviews are more quality oriented that quantity oriented. An effort is made to ask open ended questions so that the interviewers themselves can lead the team through important information with regards to usage, problems faced and other such experiences.

Personas and Scenarios are one of the best ways of demonstrating the user demographics and ways in which users use/would use the system. However, caution must be exercised when constructing personas and scenarios and it must also be noted that there could be other kinds of users not captured with personas and scenarios.

Our team created three personas clearly identifying and differentiating the three groups of users that the system had. The personas and scenarios were especially helpful when we needed to establish the validity/basis for a particular task or function. Questions like “Would our persona use this feature?” or “Does our persona need this feature?” helped us in thinking analytically and broadly about the various issues that the system faced.

Advantages:

– Extremely useful in identifying and understanding user population.

– Great way to demonstrate the groups/kinds of users and how they use the system.

Disadvantages:

– Contextual Inquiry is extremely time consuming.

– Personas may represent most but not all of the user population.

– Scenarios may not represent all the situations and ways in which users use/could use the system.

Best Time to Perform: After Contextual Inquiry and GTN.

Artifact Produced: A document containing set of Personas and Scenarios presented in an interesting and believable way.

Comparative Evaluation:

Comparative Evaluation involves looking at competing systems to gather information about what is being offered by competing systems and how they are faring in trying to achieve similar goals. One of the goals of comparative evaluation is also to look at the different features being offered by competing systems and get some ideas from it. It also involves looking at what worked and what was unsuccessful with other similar systems.

However, comparative evaluation can reveal less information when the system is new and has little or no competitors. This was a process which gave us comparatively lesser amount of information. The system had little ‘competitors’ and so we looked at other ways that were used by the users to do the same kind of job. From the process we gathered information about the positives of using various other kinds of systems (not just computer related) to do things that the system was trying to do. This gave us a clear picture of where the system stood in terms of its usage. The idea was to try to incorporate the positives of the other methods and to guard against making the same mistakes.

Advantages:

– Useful in getting a sense of where the system stood in comparison with other systems.

– Gives ideas regarding features that could be included/improvements that could be made.

– Gives a sense of what works and what does not work in a particular setting.

Disadvantages:

– Depending on system and competitors, information obtained could vary.

– It is difficult to get a peek into other systems which require authentication.

Best Time to Perform: Following personas and Scenarios.

Artifact Produced: A comparative analysis report containing a thorough analysis of relevant competitors and also conclusions as to what features could be changed/added. Positives and negatives for each competitor should be carefully documented.

Heuristic Evaluation:

Heuristic evaluation is the most popular of the usability inspection methods. It is done as a systematic inspection of a user interface design for usability. The goal of heuristic evaluation is to find the usability problems in the design so that they can be attended to as part of an iterative design process. Heuristic evaluation involves having a small set of evaluators examine the interface and judge its compliance with recognized usability principles (the “heuristics”).

It was of extreme importance in case of Project Engage. A lot of usability issues which are difficult to find using most other methods but which have a big impact on the usability of a product can be uncovered with heuristic evaluation. Jakob Nielson’s set of recommended heuristics are generally suitable for most systems but sometimes need to be tweaked for some systems.

Heuristics evaluation is really quick and does not require any outside influence in terms of users. It can be performed easily within the team and is useful for uncovering basic usability issues. Most of our basic usability issues like ‘Placement of buttons’, ‘color of text’, ‘appropriate feedback’ etc were uncovered from heuristic evaluation.

It should be noted that a heuristic evaluation will not uncover all of the usability problems and other methods have to be applied in conjunction with it for best results.

Advantages:

– Quick and easy.

– No user participation required.

– Great method for uncovering basic usability issues.

Disadvantages:

– Only basic usability issues can be uncovered.

– No participation from users may imply that the quality of information obtained from the process is not that good.

– User related issues are difficult to uncover using heuristic evaluation.

Best Time to Perform: As soon as you get to know about your system and users.

Artifact Produced: A heuristic evaluation report containing heuristic issues and recommendations to overcome them.

Survey Analysis:

It is extremely important to know users attitudes and feelings towards the system under consideration. While a survey helps to reach a wide user population, the information obtained is more quantitative than qualitative. A survey, in conjunction with Contextual inquiry can help obtain qualitative and quantitative information about users attitudes and feelings. A survey could be done at anytime that seems fit in the design cycle. Sometimes it might be a better idea to do the survey before contextual inquiry and sometimes after. It really depends in the need of the project. It is critical to think of the information that you want to get out of the survey and design the questions accordingly. Designing the questions and selecting the right sample are key to the success of the survey as a process.

We did our survey after Heuristic Evaluation and we found that not much new data was obtained from it. However a different system and things would have been different. Looking back, we also might have designed some of the questions differently to obtain better results.

Advantages:

– Can reach a large user population base.

– Good way of knowing general user attitudes and feelings about the system.

Disadvantages:

– Only quantitative information can be obtained.

– Might need a good amount of time and resource investment.

Best Time to Perform: Depending on the project and team.

Artifact Produced: A survey analysis report describing general attitudes and feelings towards the system and highlighting interesting facts or findings.

User Testing:

User Testing is the most important and informative method for discovering usability issues. User testing is a technique used to evaluate a product by testing it on users.It gives direct input on how real users use the system. Usability testing measures the usability, or ease of use, of a specific object or set of objects and is very specific and targeted. It is a long process and requires a great deal of planning.

For Engage, we performed user testing concentrating on Efficiency, Accuracy, Recall and Emotional Response. The results we got were rich in quality and helped us a lot in gathering feedback about the system. Also, they helped us in prioritizing our findings and recommendations.

From my experience, I can say that user testing needs a lot of planning, careful thought and management skills. It is important to start early and think of the many possibilities that could occur within a test. It is also very important to define your goals and know exactly what you want from the tests. Depending on the goals, it is critical to formulate tasks that have a high likelihood of producing interesting results. Careful though must go into formulating tasks as they are the basis for revealing key information. Also, it is important to capture the information correctly and take it back to the team for careful analysis.

Finally, it is crucial to have backups as rest assured something will definitely go wrong during a test and one needs to account for that.

Advantages:

– Reveals great quality information about the usability.

– Information comes directly from the users.

– User input directly enters the usability loop.

Disadvantages:

– Long process.

– A large amount of time and effort goes into user testing.

– Can be monetarily heavy.

Best Time to Perform: After usability inspection methods.

Artifact Produced: A user testing and analysis report capturing qualitative information about users using the system along with interesting recordings, video clips etc demonstrating usability issues.

Vocabulary Analysis:

A large portion of the Engage Website is text‐based. Hence the language and textual elements used in the Interface play a very important role in how well the users understand and use the system. For this reason, our team conducted a Vocabulary analysis to analyze the appropriateness of the Vocabulary and Grammar used on the website.

To accomplish our objectives, we performed three types of analysis, namely, General Vocabulary Analysis, Metaphor analysis and Object/Action analysis: general vocabulary analysis relates the terminology used in the website with the user’s cognitive interpretations and expectations. Metaphor analysis is used to discover whether functions on the website correspond accurately with the user’s experiences on other similar products. Finally, Object‐action analysis reveals inconsistencies in the behavior of different functions in the website.

Vocabulary analysis is most useful when the system is text based and has a lot of object-action pairs. It is a usability inspection method and does not involve users.

Advantages:

– Simple and quick.

– Can reveal vocabulary related issues which cannot be revealed through other usability inspection methods.

Disadvantages:

– Very targeted use revealing only vocabulary related issues.

– Useful only for some systems.

Best Time to Perform: After heuristic evaluation.

Artifact Produced: A vocabulary analysis report capturing issues faced by the system related to vocabulary and recommendations for the same.

Conclusion:

All the usability methods described above give valuable insights into the usability of a particular system. Some of the methods are usability inspection methods not involving the users while others directly involve the users. Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages and there seems to be no ‘correct order’ of performing these methods. Also, there might be no correct way of performing a particular process but there definitely are some do’s and dont’s that need to be considered for the process to be successful. I also think that the more experience one has performing these methods, the better one will get at it.