Usability Engineering

Mr. Nayan Khare

BITS Pilani
Pilani | Dubai | Goa | Hyderabad
Assistant Professor
 Goal Oriented Desi gn
• Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order – Victor
Papanek
• Human-oriented design activities:
• Understanding users’ desires, needs, motivations, and contexts
• Understanding business, technical, and domain opportunities, requirements, and
constraints
• Using this knowledge as a foundation for plans to create products whose form,
content, and behaviour is useful, usable, and desirable, as well as economically
viable and technically feasible

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 2 BITS-Pilani

 If goals of users are met, i t’s a success!
• If we design and construct products in such a way that the people who use them
achieve their goals, these people will be satisfied, effective, and happy and will
gladly pay for the products and recommend that others do the same. Assuming
that this can be achieved in a cost-effective manner, it will translate into business
success.

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 3 BITS-Pilani

 Di gital Products Today – Mark eters
Marketers • Marketers – marketplace opportunity, positioning
product in the market, inputs to design process are
limited to lists of requirements (shortage of inputs):
competition, IT resources, guesses, market surveys.
• Users tend to focus on low level tasks/workaround,
product flaws

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 4 BITS-Pilani

 Di gital Products Today – D evel opers

Developers • Developers – no shortage of inputs

into products final form and
behavior, build the product, but
doesn’t match with what the user
wants
• Why?

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 5 BITS-Pilani

 Symptoms of di gi tal products – 1
• Digitals products are rude
• Why didn’t the program notify the library?
What did it want to notify the library about?
Why is it telling us? And what are we OKing,
anyway? It is not OK that the program failed!
• Software-enabled products also. E.g., the
feature-rich smartphone doesn’t anticipate
that a user might want to add the phone
number of someone who has just called to
an existing contact. Does this take a lot of
research?

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 6 BITS-Pilani

 Symptoms of di gi tal products – 2
• Digital products require people to think
like computers
• Assume that people are technology
literate
• E.g. Microsoft Word – Action: rename a
document, either should close the
document, may have to save first…
• Forces person to think how a computer
is programmed to do the task

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 7 BITS-Pilani

 Symptoms of di gi tal products – 2
• Digital products exhibit poor behaviour
• Programs crashes, stops responding, don’t do the work they should do
• Dangerous commands – if accidentally triggered can have a catastrophic effect
E.g. Ejector seat

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 8 BITS-Pilani

 Symptoms of di gi tal products – 3
• Digital products require humans to do the heavy lifting
• Remember commands, difficulty in navigation, unable to find the locations of the
actions, forced doing the work in a specific sequence

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 9 BITS-Pilani

 Reasons for the bad products
• Ignorance about users – don’t understand how the users will actually use the
product e.g. Washing Machine
• Conflicting interests – Programmers design products
• Lack of a process
• Software has never undergone a rigorous design process from a user-centered
perspective
• Programmers today embrace the notion that integrating customers directly into
the development process on a frequent basis can solve human interface design
problems.
Is that the solution?

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 10 BITS-Pilani

 Software Li fecycl e w ith Desi gners
• Creation of our digital products
rarely take into account the
users’ goals, needs, or
motivations, and at the same
time tend to be highly reactive
to market trends and technical
constraints.

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 11 BITS-Pilani

 When things can go w rong?
• If any one of these three
foundations is significantly weak
in a product, it is unlikely to
sustain in a long run.

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 12 BITS-Pilani

 P lanning and designing behavi or using
goal directed design
• Recognizing User Goals
– What is your individual goal?
– Business goal/Personal Goal?
• List of some reasons why user interfaces fail to meet user goals
– Make users feel stupid
– Cause users to make big mistakes
– Require too much effort to operate effectively
– Don’t provide an engaging or enjoyable experience

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 13 BITS-Pilani

 Goals v ersus tasks and a ctivities
• Goals are not the same as tasks or activities.
– A goal is an expectation of an end condition
– Both activities and tasks are intermediate that help someone to reach a goal or set of goals.
• Donald Norman advocates “Activity-Centered Design” (ACD)
– Describes hierarchy in which activities are composed of tasks, which are in turn composed of actions,
which are then themselves composed of operations.
– Goals are driven by human motivations, they change very slowly (over time)
– Activities and tasks are much more transient, since they are based almost entirely on whatever
technology is at hand

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 14 BITS-Pilani

 Desi gning to meet the goals in Context
• Designers assumption
– Making interfaces easier to learn should always be a design target
– Ease of learning
– E.g. Adobe Photoshop versus ATM Kiosk
• Design target depends on the context
– who the users are
– what they are doing
– and what goals they have
• Good design is not possible following rules disconnected from the goals and
needs of the users of your product.
• Good design makes users more effective

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 15 BITS-Pilani

 Important ques ti ons for Goal-directed
desi gn
• Goal-Directed Design is a powerful tool for answering the most important
questions that crop up during the definition and design of a digital product:
– Who are my users?
– What are my users trying to accomplish?
– How do my users think about what they’re trying to accomplish?
– What kind of experiences do my users find appealing and rewarding?
– How should my product behave?
– What form should my product take?
– How will users interact with my product?
– How can my product’s functions be most effectively organized?
– How will my product introduce itself to first-time users?
– How can my product put an understandable, appealing, and controllable face on technology?
– How can my product deal with problems that users encounter?
– How will my product help infrequent and inexperienced users understand how to accomplish their goals?
– How can my product provide sufficient depth and power for expert users?

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 16 BITS-Pilani

 Goal s v ersus Exci se tasks
• Don’t confuse between goals, activity and tasks. Recollect tasks are intermediate
that help someone to reach a goal or set of goals.
• Excise requires extra work from users
• Excise tasks : don’t contribute directly to reaching the goal, but are necessary to
accomplishing it
• Example : (Goal: to reach office, tool: car); opening/closing garage, putting oil
and gas in the car and performing periodic maintenance
• Excise is the extra work that satisfies the needs of our tools to achieve our
objectives

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 17 BITS-Pilani

 Goal s and excise tasks from S oftw are
perspective
• Software, too, has goal-directed tasks and excise tasks
• The effort we expend in doing excise tasks doesn’t go directly towards
accomplishing our goals
• By eliminating the need for excise tasks, we make people more effective and
productive and improve the usability of a product, ultimately creating a better user
experience
• The existence of excise in user interfaces is a primary cause of user
dissatisfaction

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 18 BITS-Pilani

 GU I Excise
• Users expend extra effort manipulating windows and menus to accomplish
something
• With a command line, users can just type in a command and the computer
executes it immediately
• With windowing systems, they must open various folders to find the desired file or
application before they can launch it
• They don’t move a user towards his goal; they are overhead that the applications
demand
• But everybody knows that GUIs are easier to use than command-line systems.
Who is right?
• The command-line interface forces an even more expensive excise budget on
users: They must first memorize the commands
• The excise of the command-line interface becomes smaller only after a user has
invested significant time and effort in learning it
US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 19 BITS-Pilani
 E xcis e – F rom Users perspec ti ve
• Excise and expert users: We must be careful when we eliminate excise, we must
not remove it just to suit power users. Similarly, we must not force power users to
pay the full price for our providing help to new users
• Visual excise: Visual excise is the work that a user has to do to decode visual
information, such as figuring out where to begin reading on a screen, or
determining which elements on it are clickable and which are merely decoration

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 20 BITS-Pilani

Goal di rected design process

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 21 BITS-Pilani

 Goal-Directed design research process
• Initial meeting
• Literature review
• Product/Prototype and competitive audits
• Stakeholder Interviews
• SME Interviews
• User and Customer Interviews/Observation
• User observation/ethnographic field studies

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 22 BITS-Pilani

 Initial meeting
• What are we designing (the product)?
• Who are the users (who will use it)
• What do users need most (understand priority)
• Who is the Target user (from business point of view)
• Are there any known challenges ahead for the design and business team?
• Who are the competition (if any) and why?
• Existing documents that are available to understand the product and/or business
and technical domain?

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 23 BITS-Pilani

 Li terature review
• Internal documents – product marketing plans, brand strategy, market research
studies, user surveys, technology specifications and white papers, competitive
research, usability studies and metrics, customer support data etc.
• Industry reports such as business and technical journal articles.
• Web searches for related competing products, news items, independent user
forums, blog posts, and social media discussion topics.

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 24 BITS-Pilani

 P roduct/prototype and competitive audi ts
• Examine existing version or prototype
• competitor products
• (can be done in parallel to with stakeholder and SME interviews, this helps to
understand the current standard and new ideas/questions come)
• Expert review (heuristic review) for the current design and competitor product
• (have a comparison made keeping in mind the interactive and visual design
principles, helps to understand the strengths and limitations of current
design/competitor design and the functional scope of the product)

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 25 BITS-Pilani

 Stakeholder interview s
• A stakeholder is anyone with authority and/or responsibility for the product being
designed. More specifically, stakeholders are key members of the organization
commissioning the design work, and typically include executives, managers, and
representative contributors from development, sales, product management,
marketing, customer support, design, and usability. They may also include similar
people from other organizations in business partnership with the commissioning
organization.

• Interview should happen before user research begins

• Interview each stakeholder in isolation

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 26 BITS-Pilani

 Information from S takeholder
• Preliminary product vision — each business department has a slightly different
and slightly incomplete perspective on the product to be designed
• Budget and schedule — reality check on the scope of the design effort and
provide a decision point for management if user research indicates a greater (or
lesser) scope is required
• Technical constraints and opportunities — what is technically feasible given
budget, time, and technology constraints
• Business drivers — what the business is trying to accomplish. Identity if a user
need is different from the business need (obtained by user research)
• Stakeholders’ perceptions of the user — important insights on users that will
help you to formulate your user research plan or identify disconnects

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 27 BITS-Pilani

 S ME Interviews
• Experts know their domains better
• Getting information from them is a good idea
• Beware of SMEs
– SMEs are expert users – may not be suitable for intermediates, may have more management
perspective, know overall information well
– SMEs are not designers – validate proposals of design before using them
– SMEs are necessary in complex or specialized domains
– SMEs are required throughout the design process

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 28 BITS-Pilani

 C ustomer Interview s
• Consumer products – Customers are same as users, mostly, for consumer
products
• Customers may not be consumers
• Corporate/technical domains – above is not true
• Understanding customer –
– Their goals in purchasing the product
– Their frustrations with current solutions
– Their decision process for purchasing a product of the type you’re designing
– Their role in installation, maintenance, and management of the product
– Domain-related issues and vocabulary

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 29 BITS-Pilani

 U ser Interview s
• Users – main focus of design effort
– Users are the people utilizing the product to accomplish the goal
• Speak to both current and potential users
– This is necessary for any redesign effort
• Learn from users –
– The context of how the product fits into their lives or workflow: when, why, and how the product is or will
be used
– Domain knowledge from a user perspective: What do users need to know to do their jobs?
– Current tasks and activities: both those the current product is required to accomplish and those it doesn’t
support
– Goals and motivations for using their product
– Mental model: how users think about their jobs and activities, as well as what expectations users have
about the product
– Problems and frustrations with current products

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 30 BITS-Pilani

 User observation
• Users are incapable of accurately assessing their own behaviors when removed
from context of activities
• Results in less-complete and less-accurate data collected
• Solution – Interviews + Observation
– E.g. could be done using audio/video recorders, notes taking

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 31 BITS-Pilani

 Contextual E nqui ry – Ethnographic
technique
• Context – Interview users in a normal work environment. This is to say bring them
closer to real world and not put them in ideal environment. Observe the activities
they perform and their associated behaviors
• Partnership – This is not a interrogation session but a casual discussion with an
observation and capturing the structure and details.
• Interpretation – The designer is the key and should be able to assemble the facts
and analyze them to understand the design implications for the design made.
• Focus – It should be a focused discussion and should be able to direct the
interview towards the information that has to be captured.

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 32 BITS-Pilani

 Conducting contextual enquiry
• Shorten the interview process – Select a diverse group of users and conduct
sufficient number of small duration interviews.
• Use smaller design teams – Use the same design team to interview the users
sequentially (many interviews). This helps to effectively analyze and synthesize
the user information.
• Identify goals first – Identify user goals first and then the tasks
• Look beyond the business contexts – Away from business product and a
corporate environment. Ethnographic interviews could be done in consumer
domains.

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 33 BITS-Pilani

 E thnographic Interview s
• Starting point to conduct ethnographic interviews is persona hypothesis.
• Persona helps to develop behavioral models of the user and attempts to address
the below questions
– What different sorts of people might use this product?
– How might their needs and behaviors vary?
– What ranges of behavior and types of environments need to be explored?

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 34 BITS-Pilani

 C onducting Ethnographic intervi ews
• Interview teams
– Moderator – drives the interview and captures important highlights
– Facilitator – takes detailed notes and looks for missed out points to be asked
• Phases of ethnographic interviews
– Early interview – broad set of questions exploratory in nature and gathers domain knowledge, doesn’t go
into details
– Middle interview – Questions are focused on domains and start towards narrowing down seeking
clarifications wherever required to fill the gaps in the open questions asked earlier and are able to see
patterns.
– Late interview – Confirm the observed patterns with further clarification and making fine adjustments to
assumptions if any about the task and information needs. This round focuses on closed-ended questions
to complete the gaps.

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 35 BITS-Pilani

 B as is Methods
• Interview where the interaction happen
• Avoid a fixed set of questions
• Assume the role of an apprentice, not expert
• Use open-ended and close-ended questions to direct the discussion
• Focus on goals first and tasks second
• Avoid making the user a designer
• Avoid discussion about technology
• Encourage storytelling
• Ask for a show-and-tell
• Avoid leading questions

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 36 BITS-Pilani

 Other type s of Research
• Focus groups – gather data from representative users chosen to match
previously identified segments of the target market
• Market demographics and market segments – determine what motivates
people to buy from focus groups and conduct surveys with criteria: age, gender,
educational level, and home pin code
• Usability and user testing – goal of accessing a product
– Measuring how well users can complete specific, standardized tasks, as well as what problems they
encounter in doing so
• Card sorting – technique to understand how users organize information and
concepts
– Typically performed by asking users to sort a deck of cards, each containing a piece of functionality or
information related to the product or Web site
– Requires analyses results us is difficult – looking for trends, patterns, correlations

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 37 BITS-Pilani

 Other types of R es earch – Task Analysis
• Involve using either questionnaires or open-ended interviews to develop a
detailed understanding of how people currently perform specific tasks.
– Why the user is performing the task (that is, the underlying goal)
– Frequency and importance of the task
– Cues — what initiates or prompts the execution of the task
– Dependencies — what must be in place to perform the task, as well as what is dependent on the
completion of the task
– People who are involved and their roles and responsibilities
– Specific actions that are performed
– Decisions that are made
– Information that is used to support decisions
– What goes wrong — errors and exception cases
– How errors and exceptions are corrected

US ABI LI TY ENG I NEER I NG 38 BITS-Pilani