Throughout his chapter, Cockton continues to build and revise his definitions of usability. Interpretations of the concept of "affordances" in HCI are becoming increasingly diverse, extending well beyond the original Gibsonian meaning. Norwood, NJ, Intellect, Erickson, Thomas and McDonald, David W. (2008): HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works that Have Influenced the HCI Community. Of course, no method stands alone: a method is simply a tool to be used by practitioners for a purpose. This is why the term quality in use is preferred for some international standards, because this opens up a space of possible qualities of interactive performance, both in terms of what is experienced, and in terms of what is achieved, for example, an interaction can be successful, worthwhile, frustrating, unpleasant, challenging or ineffective. Blandford, A., Adams, A., Attfield, S., Buchanan, G., Gow, J., Makri, S., Rimmer, J. Evaluation. Herzberg studied motivation at work, and distinguished positive motivators from negative hygiene factors in the workplace. Although referred to as Herzbergs two-factor theory (after the two groups of factors), it spans three valences: positive, neutral and negative. CRC Presspp. We may have to close some doors here, but in doing so, we will be better equipped to open new ones, and even go through them. ISO 9241-11s three factors of usability have recently become five in by ISO 25010s quality in use factors: The two additional factors are interesting. "The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications, Second Edition (Human Factors and Ergonomics)". Secondly, there are detailed case studies of usability work within specific projects. In fact, the central value proposition of most technological tools is that they make something of value easier to achieve than it used to be. Motivator factors can cause job satisfaction, whereas hygiene factors can cause dissatisfaction. This should include all factors relevant to freedom from risk, so it is interesting to see this given special attention, rather than trusting effectiveness and satisfaction to do the work here. This practitioner schism happened only 10 years after the Software Psychology Society had co-ordinated a conference in Gaithersburg, from which the ACM CHI conference series emerged. Understand the role of usability testing in HCI Be able to define usability testing (nelson's definition vs others) Understand how usability testing is different from other evaluation methods Explain when usability studies are typically conducted and why Give examples of locations, tasks, metrics, evaluation methods that might be involved . A design agenda is therefore a list of design tasks, which need to be managed within an embracing development process. Eventually, I identified a possible data path that required installing the Nokia PC suite on my current laptop, backing up contacts from my old phone to my laptop, downloading a freeware program that would convert contacts from Nokias proprietary backup format into a text format for spreadsheets/databases (comma separated values - .csv), failing to import it into a cloud service, importing it into the Windows Address Book on my laptop (after spreadsheet editing), and then finally synchronising the contacts instead via iTunes with my new iPhone. Blandford, A., Hyde, J. K., Green, T. R. G. & Connell, I. online contact form. They wrestle with how best to achieve these things given the constraints they work under. Usability Evaluation Methods are very similar - everything is fine once youve worked to provide everything thats missing. System-centred inspection methods can identify such causes. Where measures relate directly to designed benefits and anticipated adverse interactions, this approach is known as direct worth instrumentation (Cockton 2008b). However, each new user experience attribute introduces new measurement challenges, as do longer term measures associated with achieved value and persistent adverse consequences. Participants are asked to verbalize their thoughts while they are interacting with the product. Finally, designers should include these aspects in their agenda to enhance technology acceptance, performance and satiate users necessaries. Although now buried under broader layers of quality in use and user experience, usability is not dead. The story of usability is a perverse journey from simplicity to complexity. Pearson Education Limited, Edinburgh, Booth P (1989) An introduction to human-computer interaction. I would argue that CASSM and DiCoT are examples of formative methods that address this need, focusing on how products are used in context, and how an understanding of situated use can inform the design of future products. Certainly one can find examples of bad usability practice, and I cannot judge what other people may have encountered. Synthesizability: It determines the effects of past operations on current states. HCI emphasizes developing a deep understanding of user . The benefit has to do with its overall success in reducing the usability problems of an earlier process that used to be difficult to coordinate and error prone, and this increase in usability only matters because it is delivering a real benefit. Much of the story of usability reflects a tension between the tight software view and the broader sociotechnical view of system boundaries. Human-computer interaction (HCI) is an area of research and practice that emerged in the early 1980s, initially as a specialty area in computer science embracing cognitive science and human factors engineering. Blandford, A., Green, T. R. G., Furniss, D. & Makri, S. (2008b) Evaluating system utility and conceptual fit using CASSM. Evaluation in HCI. Quick and dirty user testing soon overtook Heuristic Evaluation (compare the survey of Venturi et al. Once thresholds for severity criteria have been specified, it is not clear how designers can or should trade off factors such as efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction against each other. Methods are only one aspect of usability work. Author/Copyright holder: Courtesy of Michael Sandberg. Some of the reasons for this success are clearly technical. With this in place, attention is refocused on current changes in the interaction design landscape that should give usability a stable place within a broader understanding of designing for human values (Harper et al. Human factors engineering (HFE) and human-computer interaction (HCI) are scientific and professional disciplines with shared histories and practices that aim to support people's performance and experiences by optimizing human-system interactions.An important application of HFE and HCI is the design and evaluation of interactive computing technologies across domains, including healthcare, to . pp. Gilbert is correct that UX skills are increasingly distributed across roles. In this lecture of Human Computer Interaction we have cover short intro of HCI and over lecture topic Usability Engineering. Where experiential values are not to the fore, detailed evaluation of user interactions may not be worthwhile if products and services have been shown to deliver or generously donate value. There are no successful digital technologies without what could be usability flaws to some HCI experts (I can always find some!). Despite the psychological marginalisation of designers experience and expertise when expressed in guidelines, patterns and heuristics, these can be our most critical resource for achieving usability best practice. & Clarke, S. (2006) Cognitive dimensions: Achievements, new directions, and open questions. exploring a cloud email contacts service, failing to upload to it. It seems likely that many of you are practitioners in business, technology, healthcare, finance, government, and other applied fields. A sensible model is to include both inspection/heuristics and empirical research in a product development program, and move back and forth among the methods in a star pattern similar to the star life cycle of interactive system development, with its alternating waves of creative and structuring activities [4]. pp. Initially it was suggested that children of 13 years and older can think aloud (Hanna et al., 1997). Pattern: Input Prompt Prefill a text field or dropdown with a prompt that tells the user what to do or type. Retrieved 1 December 2011 from International Standards Association: http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumb John, Bonnie E. and Kieras, David E. (1996): Using GOMS for User Interface Design and Evaluation: Which Technique?. Cognitive Walkthrough: Usability Evaluation Materials, Technical Report TR-1997-20, Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. We cannot reason solely in terms of whether software is inherently usable or not, but instead have to consider what does or will happen when software is used, whether successfully, unsuccessfully, or some mix of both. To focus this selection and adaptation process, we have developed the Pret A Rapporter framework (Blandford et al, 2008a) for planning a study. 2007) revealed one boys comfort at seeing his separated family symbolically united on the clocks face. As in geology, we need to understand the present intellectual landscape in terms of its underlying historical processes and upheavals. In these environments, we learned some contextual information despite the lab setting. This is the second of three definitions presented in this encyclopaedia entry. However, the relative contributions of usability, positive user experience, business strategy and marketing expertise are not clear, and in some ways irrelevant. User experience work will thus increasingly require the development of custom evaluation instruments for experience attributes and worthwhile outcomes. Figure 15.8 A-B: Whats Sailable: A Boat Alone or a Crewed Boat in Specific Sea Conditions? Design success depends on effective integration of all its inputs. Sometimes, usability in practice is portrayed as a mere quality assurance process, or as Gilbert says, a hygiene factor. To design usable systems, experts in the HCI arena are Familiarity with basic computer operations is now widespread, as evidenced by terms such as digital natives and digital exclusion, which would have had little traction in the 1980s. I learned how to synchronise my iPhone via iTunes for the first time. The same is true in most contexts: the system has to perform well, it has to be usable and provide a positive user experience, but it also has to fit well into the context of use. Accessed 15/9/11 at http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/asp/materials/SVHE_1.0/materials.pdf, Lavery, D., Cockton, G., and Atkinson, M. P. 1996. Those who can integrate evaluation and invention can add more value to the product development process and can help ensure usability/value in the ultimate product. Yet we cannot simply discard the concept of usability and move on. The danger of this approach is that a casual readerespecially one with a limited command of Englishmay learn from the chapter precisely the ideas Cockton eventually disproves. It is true that laboratory usability evaluation typically does try to isolate cognitive factors by treating the users goals and motivation as givens, rather than attempting to discover them. Usability engineering is an emerging approach to the improvement of human computer interaction (for example: Bennett, 1984; Butler, 1985; Carroll and Rosson, 1985; Good, et al., 1986; Gould and Lewis, 1985; Gould, et al., 1987; and Shackel, 1984 ). It brought together knowledge and capabilities from psychology and computer science. The first important element of the framework is making explicit the obvious point that every study is conducted for a purpose, and that that purpose needs to be clear (whether it is formative or summative, focused or exploratory). Copyright terms and licence: CC-Att-2 (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Unported). Human-computer interaction (HCI) . What overall judgement can we come to here? In well directed design teams, there will not be enough work for a pure usability specialist. We can of course argue that when a participant has trouble participating in an evaluation session, we have to train the participant. http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2003/nt_2003_04_07_usability.htm. Usability can thus be understood as a major facet of user experience that can reduce achieved worth through adverse usage costs, but can only add to achieved worth through the iterative removal of usability problems. We observed vehicle records and photographed and analyzed artifacts (see Figure 3) to learn how Web technology could support the information needs of vehicle owners. The value of the recent widening focus to user experience is that it places usability work in context. Jakob Nielsen: Usability Engineering. cmbCarlo. Herzberg, Frederick (1973): Work and the Nature of Man. For example, where problems arise with selecting, collecting, using and returning hired vans, it is essential to instrument the van hire depots, not the web site. The details of guidelines on designing GUI can be found in [6] and [13]. Figure 15.7: Usability Expert at Work: Alan Woolrych at the University of Sunderland using a minimal Mobile Usability Lab setup of webcam with audio recording plus recording of PC screen and sound, complemented by an eye tracker to his right. Reproduced with permission. Empirical evaluation methods focus on evidence of good or poor usability, i.e., the positive or negative effects of attributes of software, hardware, user capabilities and usage environments. Blandford, A. E., Wong, B. L. W., Connell, I. In: Law, Effie Lai-Chong, Scapin, Dominique, Cockton, Gilbert, Springett, Mark,Stary, C. and Winckler, Marco (eds.). There are no off-the-shelf evaluation methods. Similarly, the absence of negative hygiene factors does not result in satisfaction, but in the (neutral) absence of (dis)satisfaction. We went on to develop CASSM (Blandford et al, 2008b) as a method for systematically evaluating the quality of the conceptual fit between a system and its users. By this I do not mean benefit in principle, but rather the benefit anticipated by or experienced by the user. In his book Change by Design, Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, builds a compelling case for the human-centred practices of multi-disciplinary design teams. Outstanding design always overachieves, giving users/owners/sponsors far more than they were expecting. Check our frequentlyaskedquestions. Visibility of the system's status. 97-111, Iivari, N. (2005): Usability Specialists - 'Mommy Mob', 'Realistic Humanists' or 'Staid Researchers'? Early field research for the Cisco Unified Communications System, observing how people use a variety of communication methods and tools in large enterprise environments. Also, if I had used my previous laptop, the required phone utility suite was already installed and there should have been no initial connection problems. See Figures 1 and 2. Evaluation methods and metrics are not completely documented in any literature. Methods contribute to this work. 1997): who cares what poor design will do to users, its bad enough that its poor design! User has no workaround to the problem. A slight drawback of the methods was that children perceived the questions asked by the robot to be more difficult than those asked by a human facilitator. As a result, patients now can come to the clinic for a follow up laboratory test without having to remember to bring a written copy of the lab order. Human-Computer Interaction researchers and Interaction Design professionals have developed evaluation methods that determine whether or not an interactive system or device is usable. The reward is that usability work could become much more rewarding and less fraught. Time on task is a convenient measure for usability, and for some usage contexts it is possible to specify worthwhile targets, e.g., for supermarket checkouts thetarget time to check out representative trolleys of purchases could be 30 minutes for 10 typical trolley loads of shopping). Put simply, usability evaluation assesses the extent to which an interactive system is easy and pleasant to use. More recent research showed that children of 7 years and older can think aloud when the protocol for facilitating the verbalizations is adjusted to a more relaxed dialogue (Donker and Markopoulos, 2002). Figure 15.11: Example heuristics orginally developed in Molich and Nielsen 1990 and Nielsen and Molich 1990. System-centred inspection methods focus solely on software and hardware features for attributes that will promote or obstruct usability. The problem with usability as originally conceived in isolation from other design concerns is that it only supports the identification and correction of defects, and not the identification and creation of positive qualities. 1988) published a long list of possible evaluation measures, including: Measure without measure: theres so much scope for scoring, available commands not invoked/regressive behaviours, Percentage of tasks completed in time period, superior competitor products on a measure, users expressing frustration or satisfaction. Things arent this simple at all though, but lets start by considering the following propositions about usability evaluation: Usability is an inherent measurable property of all interactive digital technologies. & Millard, N. (2005) Providing value to customers in e-commerce environments: the customers perspective. For their first three decades of computing, almost all users were highly trained specialists of expensive centralised equipment. Each proposition is not wholly true, and can be mostly false. There are many usage contexts where time is limited. Similarly, employees may thoroughly enjoy a fancy multimedia fire safety training title, but it could be far less effective (and thus potentially deadly) compared to the effectiveness of a boring instructional text-with-pictures version. Particularly when evaluating use in context, there doesnt have to be an either-or between analytical and empirical methods. See the "Exceptions" section (and subsection "allRightsReserved-UsedWithoutPermission") on the page copyright notice. None of the experienced usability problems would have been fixed. The term "Usability Engineering" has widely been propagated since Jakob Nielsen's seminal book . 2011) have given a new lease of life to practical model-based evaluation in HCI. What has not changed is the potential confusion over what usability is, which has existed from the first days of HCI, i.e., whether software or usage is usable. People who specialize in HCI think about how to design and implement computer systems that satisfy human users. NetCom_Mq1. In: Erickson, Thomas and McDonald, David W. (3585)". From 1998, Alan Woolrych, Darryn Lavery (to 2000), myself and colleagues at Sunderland University built on these foundations in a series of studies that exposed the impact of specific resources on the quality of usability work (e.g., Cockton et al. Heuristics generalise more detailed guidelines from collections such as Smith and Mosier. pp. This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution. There were clear usability issues here, as the email service gave no feedback as to why it was failing to upload the contacts. There is no excuse for such poor interaction design in 2011, which forced me to try a few times before I realised that it would not work, at least with the data that I had. design practices. They will set up a strategy for the user experience (UX targets) and measure the performance of their UX. At one level, this is because usability and experienced benefit interact in complex ways. ISO/IEC 25010 Systems and software engineering -- Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE) -- System and software quality models. Essentialist usability is, causally homogeneous. (I have included a selection of these at the end of my commentary.) Level 2 - Severe problem causing possible loss of data. Psychologically-based research on usability methods in major conferences remained strong into the early 1990s. ISO 9241-11 distinguishes three component factors of usability: effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction. If this is not the case, then high quality usability evaluation will present complex logistical challenges that require extensive evaluator expertise and project specific resources. Pearson Education Limited, Harlow, Eason KD (1984) Towards the experimental study of usability. It extends specified users and specified goals to potentially any aspect of a context of use. In: Seffah, A., Gulliksen, J., Desmarais, M.C. We discuss some of the key analyses of affordances in HCI research and make three related claims. 2004, Cockton et al. Accessed 1 May 2015, Sims R (1997) Interactivity: a forgotten art?. There are no successful digital technologies without what might be regarded as usability flaws. Two approaches have been applied: by providing different strategies for supporting verbalizations and by providing non-verbal ways to children for expressing their opinion. It does not hold for some other design philosophies (e.g., Sengers and Gaver 2006) that give rise to different design agendas. Third, as innovation continues to create new products with new capabilities, the leading edge of UX keeps moving forward. By the time we get to sections 15.5.1 and 15.5.2, Cockton is accurately describing the situation usability practitioners face: There is no complete published user testing method that novices can pick up and use as is. Thus to know that performance is regarded as pitiful, we would need to choose to measure relevant subjective judgments. There is no specialist ACM conference with a focus on usability evaluation, but the SIGCHI DIS (Designing Interactive Systems) conference proceedings and the DUX (Designing for User Experiences) conference proceedings do contain some valuable research papers, as does the SIGCHI CSCW conference series. In: Angela.Sasse, M. andJohnson, Chris (eds.) What matters is the resulting balance of worth as judged by all relevant stakeholders, i.e., not just users, but also, for example, projects sponsors, service provision staff, service management, politicians, parents, business partners, and even the general public. There is much work in getting usability work to work, and as with all knowledge-based work, methods cannot copied from books and applied without a strong understanding of fundamental underlying concepts. Once we focus on interaction, a wider view is inevitable, favouring a broad range of concerns over a narrow focus on software and hardware features. At the frontiers of user experience research, the potentials for exploiting insights from the humanities are being increasingly demonstrated (e.g., Bardzell 2011, Bardzell and Bardzell 2011, Blythe et al. & Lunt, P. (2005) Social empowerment and exclusion: A case study on digital libraries. 2012), and more broadly within the broader context of usability work (Woolrych et al. This means that we cannot and should not assess usability evaluation methods in artificial isolated research settings. This relating of usability to the real world was given more structure in the ISO 9241-11 Human Factors standard, which related usability to the usage context as the: Extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use. There is a strong contrast here with the usability crisis of the 1980s. Hertzum & Jacobsen, 2001), has limited our perspective in terms of what is valuable about evaluation methods. Instead, the scope of usability work, and the methods used, need to be planned with other design and development activities. Model-free inspection methods appeared at the end of the 1980s, with rapid evolution in the early 1990s. A preference for psychometrically robust metrics must often be subordinated to the needs to measure specific value in the world, however and wherever it occurs. 14-16. Finally, usability is continually driven forward by competition within a product domain. However, the reality is that we all continue to experience frustrations when using interactive digital technologies, and often we would say that we do find them difficult to use. Issue-Based Metrics. Reproduced with permission. PubMedGoogle Scholar, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Seffah, A., Desmarais, M.C., Metzker, E. (2005). Figure 15.4: Holding or Pressing? All user testing requires extensive project-specific planning and implementation. Being unable to blame Windows for anything (this time)! Although our work is inspired by the work of these and other colleagues, we do not claim in this . The most common way to identify usability issues is during a study in which you are interacting with a participant directly. . Based on previous research in the field we demonstrate how an initially multidimensional and complicated phenomenon can be explained and predicted by a relatively simple . You must choose one that fits your design philosophy. A hope was expressed that once contexts of use were better understood, and contextual insights could be shown to inform successful design across a diverse range of projects, then new contextual measures would be found for more appropriate evaluation of user experiences. Such methods sought to reduce the cost of usability evaluation by discounting across a range of resources, especially users (none required, unlike user testing), expertise (transferred by heuristics/models to novices) or extensive models (none required, unlike GOMS). Usability thus became a key goal for the design of any interactive software that would not be used by trained technical computer specialists. Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2000 Human Factors in Computing Systems ConferenceApril 1-6, 2000, The Hague, The Netherlands. If we parse and remove the meaning that we can attribute to any of them, we drain the meaning from the others. Attending to poor usability can remove adverse demotivating hygiene factors, but it cannot introduce positive motivators. First, one note on terminology: throughout this commentary I use the word product to refer to anything that is being designed for interactive use, be it software, website, system, or device, or any new features of these. 791-817. In: Sustainable Design. zExamples of errors - Selecting wrong menu, button, icon, etc. These result from multi-factorial interactions between users, goals, contexts and a software product. Reducing the profession to a particular type of laboratory evaluation makes it seem limited and can raise questions about its relevance. However, I wasted at least 30 minutes on a cloud computing option suggested on Facebook (I had to add email to the cloud service before failing to upload from the .csv file). In: Proceedings of DIS06: Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, & Techniques 2006. pp. This paper presents results of a survey asking usability.
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