Welcome to the Scottish Usability Professionals’ Association

(SUPA)

www.scottishupa.org.uk

What is SUPA?• Local (Scottish) chapter of the UPA• Monthly events and networking• Membership of UPA gives free entry to

these and UPA events in London (UK UPA) and elsewhere in the UK

• Many other benefits to UPA membership– Free entry to UPA meetings in UK– Quarterly magazine UX– Discount to annual conference

Future SUPA eventsBuilding the Usability Profession 3rd December 2008 –

Speaker: Tom McEwan, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Interaction Design, Napier University

Venue: Microsoft Scotland, Waverley Gate, 2-4 Waterloo Place, Edinburgh, EH1 3EG

Time: 18:30Entrance: free to UPA members and £10 for non-members (£5 for student non-members).

Please register in advance at http://www.scottishupa.org.uk/

Other Future events• Monthly UK UPA events (London) and

occasional regional talks • UPA International Conference – Turin, Italy, 5 –

7 December 2008• Future talks – your ideas welcome!

User Centred Design

Jim WilliamsWeb Analyst

weeworld.com

What is Usability

– Effectiveness – Can they reach their goals• find what they are looking for• do what they want to do?

– Efficiency – How fast• number of errors• amount of effort• number of steps?

– Satisfaction – Was it a good/bad experience? • Do it again? • Recommend to others?

“The effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specified users achieve specified goals in particular

environments” ISO 13407 – User Centred Design Process for Interactive Systems

What is UCD?• User-centered design (UCD) is an approach to design

that grounds the process in information about the people who will use the product. UCD processes focus on users through the planning, design and development of a product.

ISO 13407•There is an international standard that is the basis for many UCD methodologies. •This standard (ISO 13407: Human-centred design process) defines a general process for including human-centered activities throughout a development life-cycle, but does not specify exact methods.

UCD

• In this model, once the need to use a human centered design process has been identified, four activities form the main cycle of work:

• Specify the context of useIdentify the people who will use the product, what they will use it for, and under what conditions they will use it.

• Specify requirementsIdentify any business requirements or user goals that must be met for the product to be successful.

• Create design solutionsThis part of the process may be done in stages, building from a rough concept to a complete design.

• Evaluate designsThe most important part of this process is that evaluation - ideally through usability testing with actual users - is as integral as quality testing is to good software development.

• The process ends - and the product can be released - once the requirements are met.

The Gulf of Execution

User’s Mental Model

Designer’s Model

Business’sModel

Gulf of ExecutionWe need to use this architectureLets use this new cool technologyOur database only accepts these characters

We sell these products Our company is structured this wayPeople should know about the company history

I want to buy this product I want to register for updates I need to find this information

The Gulf of Execution

User’s Mental Model

Designer’s Model

Business’sModel

Gulf of Execution

Task Analysis & Usability Methods

We need to use this architectureLets use this new cool technologyOur database only accepts these characters

We sell these products Our company is structured this wayPeople should know about the company history

I want to buy this product I want to register for updates I need to find this information

A common approach to Web design Developers define the system based on functionality and business

wishes (without looking at users) The ‘front end’ team puts an interface on As launch approaches:

Site demo given to client / management, or Site is reviewed with end users for usefulness (maybe)

Fix the problems or release it anyway?…

Life Cycle Phase

Cost

of

Des

ign

Chan

ge

Project scoping Design Build Test Implementation

0

The cost of a complete web site overhaul is roughly 30 times that of incorporating testing

early on(Forrester Research “Why Most Web Sites Fail”)

A Typical UCD Methodology• Analysis Phase

– Meet with key stakeholders to set vision – Include usability tasks in the project plan – Assemble a multidisciplinary team to ensure complete expertise – Develop usability goals and objectives – Conduct field studies – Look at competitive products – Create user profiles – Develop a task analysis – Document user scenarios – Document user performance requirements

• Design Phase– Begin to brainstorm design concepts and metaphors – Develop screen flow and navigation model – Do walkthroughs of design concepts – Begin design with paper and pencil – Create low-fidelity prototypes – Conduct usability testing on low-fidelity prototypes – Create high-fidelity detailed design – Do usability testing again – Document standards and guidelines – Create a design specification

• Implementation Phase– Do ongoing heuristic evaluations – Work closely with delivery team as design is implemented – Conduct usability testing as soon as possible

• Deployment Phase– Use surveys to get user feedback – Conduct field studies to get info about actual use – Check objectives using usability testing

• You may notice that "usability testing" appears several times throughout the process, from the first phase to the last.

Financial persona - Jane• Retail manager moving to larger home

• Personal detail– Jane (30) is the manager of a shoe shop in the Lake District, earning £23,000. Recently married, she would

like to borrow up to 80% of the value of any new home they find.

• Purpose of visit– Jane and her husband are looking to move from their Cumbrian village to a home in Carlisle, their nearest

town.They are researching mortgage providers so that they can make an immediate offer on any home that they find in their search. Carlisle is a popular place to live, and the advantage of making a cash offer will give them a good deal of negotiating power when they do come to make an offer.They have so far identified two other organisations as likely providers, and are systematically comparing organisations to get the best deal.

• Attributes– Technically, Jane is very able. Neither she nor her partner require assistance in using sites. Their market

awareness is very high, and they are very well-versed in the mortgage application process.• Tasks and information needed

– What mortgages and rates Britannia has to offerBenefits of choosing Britannia over other providersCost of mortgage over time – how long until it is paid offWill apply online.

• How we can help this person– Show breadth of mortgage products on offer

Provide clear calls to action to apply onlineQuick and simple online quotation – they will be doing this process on many sites.

Usability Testing

• Expert/Heuristic Review– Greater speed less

cost• User Testing

– User profiles– User Scenarios

Other early activitiesCard sortingPaper prototyping

Usability Testing• Getting Empirical

evidence throughout design process

• Time required for preparing, recruitment, analysis

• Tactical testing – quick and dirty?

UCD & Agile

• Time - Rapid Development Sprint (2 week sprints v 4+ weeks for testing)

• Multi-disciplinary teams• How to fit into scrum• How to fit into iterations• How to accommodate project slippage• Introduces delay• Interrupts project rhythm

Background info URLs

• http://www.stcsig.org/usability/topics/articles/ucd%20_web_devel.html

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-centered_design

Some other articles on Agile• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development

 many articles on web about agile & usability e.g http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/agileUsability.htmhttp://usability.typepad.com/confusability/2006/04/agile_usability.htmlHYPERLINK "http://www.jonathanboutelle.com/mt/archives/2005/08/usability_testi_1.html"www.jonathanboutelle.com/mt/ archives/2005/08/usability_testi_1.html   

Fyi background info agile • Agile Mindset• Agile is a software development movement that aims to cut fat from the industry's trademark bulky timescales and bloated specifications. Its been devised by

'developers' or 'programmers' and as such has so far been pretty thin on procedural detail for the user experience designers. In fact, some of the specific methodologies within the Agile family make absolutely no mention of 'experience design' at all. Most advocate lines of code being written from the very beginning of a project. Almost all state that you work through a list of requirements until you have the minimum amount of functionality to release a product. However, few go into any detail about how you get to the point of having requirements in the first place.

• So, this is where a project team used to working from the very start of a project (determining what it is that needs building) can go wrong. Trying to lay lines of code before you have some idea about why or for what purpose is like taking a journey to a foreign city you've never been to before, without looking at a map first. You may hit the right continent if you have some vague sense of direction, however, all roads do not lead to Rome.

• But there's more to Agile than laying lines of code as soon as possible. Its a mindset which can rid the shackles of rigid 'design first' processes that pride themselves on quality but have done more than their fair share of creating the software industry's bad reputation by delivering late or not to specification or not within budget (or a combination of any and all of these). The Agile Manifesto is a set of fundamental tenets to remind Aglie practitioners to "Get On With It". And really, thats what it boils down to, regardless of which role you fulfill in the team.

• In my recent experience of working on a project that was very much at 'seed' stage when we began trying to work out which of the many manifestations it could take on, I found that an Agile mindset was an effective mechanism for ensuring that rediculously tight deadlines would be met. Being Agile means that the perfectionist that lays within most experience designers has to be persuaded that it's OK to get it right the second or even third time. Taking a 'sketch approach' to design where the first versions are a best guess based on the knowledge available at that time, abates deliberation for fear of getting it wrong. Watefall processes are frought with fear of the bad specification. Once coded, a design is set in stone, not for revision. Technical folk usually get very cranky when you sheepishly sidle up to them with "You know that section here... the one that took you weeks to code, tweak and get just right... well... um... we er, need to um, change it... y'know, just a little bit..." [ducks for cover]. However, when the project team all agree up front that everything is subject to change, it loosens up that feeling of foreboding which has a side-effect of making people check thrice before committing to a specification. Naturally, changing things takes time, but when things take less time to design in the first place, you have more time to iterate until it is right.

• A coding practice known as Refactoring can liberate us all from what Alan Cooper refers to as scar tissue, a phenomenon where code that has to be changed leaves a 'scar' that makes the foundations of the program unsound. It can be argued that working in an object oriented fashion should enable components of a system to be rebuilt with no impact on the remaining body of code, therefore should be the method of choice when following an Agile development process.

• The Agile shift in thinking about experience design is not just about being iterative. Its fundamentally about designing in an object-oriented fashion too. Components need to be designed individually in order that they can be built individually in a staggered project timeline. Some components will be a few degrees more defined than others at any one time and this is hard to reconcile at first. Its uncomfortable thinking that you have to design a mid section before a start section etc. Some might say you can't possibly do it and expect to get it right. And there's the crux of the mindset right there. You don't expect to get it right the first time. You expect to get it right the second or third time around, when you have had time to design the start section.

• Agile works, but the idea of laying lines of code from the outset of a project, does not seem like a great idea to me, for reasons stated earlier. I think this is where a production process can learn from User Centred Design's 'understand' or 'discovery' phase to flesh out business requirements, user requirements and the competitive marketplace. I would still advocate that the body of work that is done in this period, is managed using an Agile methodology like SCRUM though, as it still works to 'gee the team along' even when they're not laying lines of code. The rhythm set by being iterative, combined with an disparaging attitude to excessive documentation and ecouraging face to face dialogue, is a very effective framework to ensure maximum efficiency within the team.

• It does take a significant 'opening of the mind' to allow ourselves to really work in this way, when everything we've known to date says we're going to get burned if we do. But it's inevitable that you get burned the first time you try new things. We must persevere, because unless the software and web industry embraces a total shift toward delivering on time, to spec and on budget, clients will continue to lose faith in its ability to get itself together. This will affect its monetary value in very real terms. If the tech sector's stock price collapses, as the survivors the dotcom crash know only too well, it will really, really hurt.

Usability activities during design

Requirements Design Build Test Implement

User / Task / Environment profiles

‘Competitor’ usability benchmarkScenario creation, Personas, release criteria, usability

metricsStyle guide

Usability inspection Usability testing

User feedback, site modifications

Information architecturePrototype design

Design IterationFeedback

Planning: Cost-benefit analysis, method selection, goal setting

User Profile

• Researching in early stages with users should capture information about the target audience and if any of that has design implications

Characteristics Description Design Implications Personal / physical characteristics

Job profile

Education

Style preferences

Concerns

Wants