Ask Eric: Questions & Answers

December 15, 2005 – submitted by Rahul Verma of Mohali India

Question: My question is actually in continuation to the question and its answer: December 13 , 2005 – submitted by Dan Pelman of Oklahoma City, OK

The usability staff, most of the time, in most of the companies is not 10% of the total team size – is it still possible to attain the same level of usability in a product? What are the non-essential parts we can do away with, considering that the time frames do not change and we have limited budgets. In other words, how to decide which methods to use for design, which to use for evaluation and testing and whether post-implementation UI inspection should be conducted or not?

Eric's response: Indeed, today we usually have less than the required 10% of the development population allocated to usability work. In some cases this means that the UI design will be done by computer specialists, and other types of analysts who are amateurs at usability work. In this case they tend to spend the same amount of time and budget on UI design, but have poor results. This is not smart.

In some cases the limited usability team must prioritize their attention. They need to rank the projects based on business imperative and then can only work fully on the top priorities. This is the best way to handle a limited team. But clearly, one hates to see anything built that is not usable.

As the level of usability staff gets very low they often shift into an evaluative mode. This is also attractive since doing usability testing is the easiest of the usability engineering skills. But this is truly horrible. Amateurs create poor designs. We test them and identify that they are bad, perhaps showing where the problems are. The amateurs try to fix the designs. They do this poorly and then make more problems as a spinoff of the fixes. Then we test again. This is not smart.

December 6 , 2005 – submitted by Denita Shaw of Texas, USA

Question: Since the writing of your book "Institutionalization of Usability", can you provide me with some organizations who have adopted the matrix infrastructure? Also, are you aware of any organizations who have a CXO (Chief User Experience Officer)?

Eric's response: The Chief User Experience Officers are currently few and far between. In fact, about half of the ones I have encountered have been more gimmick than substance. But the matrix structure is almost everywhere. While there might be some variations, EVERY large company I know who seriously does usability work uses a matrix.

October 7, 2005 – submitted by Suzanne Filipe of Laval, Canada

Question: Our application is 20 years old, from DOS to JAVA interfaces. No real usability work was ever done on it. Now I'm asked to fix the GUI. But when I presented the usability principles a big question arose. My users have acquired certain habits of using the old GUI, even though the system is badly designed. What kind of arguments can I use to convince management to implement usability principles and standards even if those will have a tremendous impact on the users' old navigation habits. How can we migrate without creating user frustrations.

Many thanks.

Eric's response: No one ever complains because you have clearer error message wording.

I have never heard a user complain because of a truly better interface structure and navigation.

But there are things to watch for. In particular "proactive inhibition" is dangerous. This means that if a user has learned, and overlearned, a behavior (for example using ENTER to go to the next field), and then you switch it (Enter sends the whole screen). Then the old way will occur occasionally, even after YEARS have gone by. So you have to make sure nothing bad happens when they do things the old way by accident.

September 24, 2005 – submitted by Valinda Bryan of USA

Question: I need to know the roles of language/culture development on the decision making.

Eric's response: Language and culture have a huge impact on decision making.

They frame the goals (values) that underlie decisions. For example: getting things done fast is less important in an Asian culture where time is seen as cyclical.

They frame the practicalities. For example, in China, the main concern of a purchaser is that the goods might be fakes.

They frame the style of decisions. For example, Asian cultures will depend more on hierarchy (the senior/rich person decides) and communalism (the perception of the group is important). In Arabic countries people are quite averse to risk-taking. In America we value risk-takers.

Much of the international conflict in the world may result from disconnects on these important cultural contexts and conventions. Arabic statesmen don't "get" our President saying "Dead or Alive," and Mr. Bush has no idea of the context of their statements about "hospitality."

August 19, 2005 – submitted by Ronald Verschueren of Rotterdam, Netherlands

Question: As one of your certified usability analysts I have a question:

How should I organize usability issues / criteria? John Meech has been talking about Navigation, Content, Presentation, Interaction. But what should be the subcategories. Is there any best practices, white paper or other content about this?

Eric's response: Ronald, thanks for the question. Always love to hear from CUAs.

Ronald, thanks for the question. Always love to hear from CUAs.

Another model that I like is focused more on the presentation and interaction issues. This is to break considerations down by visual, intellectual, memory, and motor systems. This is particularly nice when looking at research results. So you might list all research on visual access to pages.

Yet another way to categorize insights is by the dependent variables of usability work. That is: speed, accuracy, training requirements, satisfaction, and safety. So you can list insights that help limit training requirements (make an application self-evident).

Of course you can also look at the categorizations we have developed for the "Putting Research into Practice" course.

August 2, 2005 – submitted by Joe of United Kingdom

Question: My company is creating a new in-house implementation team in India. They will be taking responsibility for a significant part of the client code for our products. These products are written in a variety of languages such as .NET, java, tcl, oracle forms etc., and are very complex in nature. All analysis and design is being done back at European HQ and will be passed to the India team to execute. The analysis & design includes the usability aspects. Given that you have experience working with offshore teams, is there any advice you can give, or point me at, to increase the chance of success in this new way of working?

Eric's response: In working with an offshore coding team you must very precisely specify the appearance and behavior of the desired interface. You should provide a complete design and description. Consider a complete prototype of the interface. Be sure to include details of error handling as well as processing specifications.

We have been very successful in doing usability work from India. But unless you have a team in India that is specialized in usability, you can not expect good design decisions from your IT team.

For more information, see my white paper on offshore usability.

July 15, 2005 – submitted by Shikha Pandey of India

Question: What is meant by "institutionalized usability"?

Eric's response: Institutionalization of usability is when an organization decides to routinely include a systematic process for usability. The organization can then support this work with a refined methodology, training, certification, tools, templates, standards, and quality assurance.

Piecemeal usability is the opposite. Piecemeal is when an organization has a few good usability designers scattered around the organization and IF they happen to be assigned to the project then usability is good.

June 20, 2005 – submitted by Prashant Dubey of Ahmedabad, India

Question: I was taking the usability quiz recently on your Web site. And I did fairly well! But I have one doubt about the last question which says: The most important factor leading to the development of usable software is: The correct answer was "Management Buy-in"

What is Management Buy-in? How does it help as an important factor in developing usable software?

Thank you

Eric's response: VERY good question, Prashant. You are right in thinking that management people don't do the "real work" of usability. Their hands never touch the interface design (we hope). So how can they be so important?

We are moving toward a new type of usability work. It can no longer be ad hoc and piecemeal. It must be systematic and process oriented. It needs to be a mature area of business operations; not some lonely practitioner working in a corner. Management makes all the difference in this transition. Management must make the decision and change the culture. From the trenches you might be able to do some nice design, get training, or suggest some standards. But it takes a high-level manager to build a usability factory.

April 28, 2005 – submitted by Sonja Craig of Dearborn, MI

Question: Does a Web administrator need any different skills to run an intranet vs. extranet vs. Internet site?

Eric's response: The basic operation of the site (server management and such) would seem to be quite similar. With intranets and extranets there are issues like VPN management. With public Web sites the volume of transactions can be larger than any private facility. Therefore there are likely to be issues of load balancing. Unfortunately, today security is a real concern for everyone. But the types of attack are likely to be a bit different (e.g., public sites are more likely candidates for denial of service attacks, as success makes a bigger splash in the news).

I have been referring to operating the sites administratively. If you look at design issues things are far more different. Type of users are likely to be radically different. The business goals are different. So if you are talking about design and maintenance these are worlds apart.

March 15, 2005 – submitted by Aqdas Malik of Helsinki, Finland

Question: Could you please provide major usability problems that you found in popular software designed for consumers (MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Skype, Adobe Photoshop, WinZip, Norton AV to name a few). I believe that providing the screenshots of the problems/flaws and recommended solutions will help s/w designers to design more usable products in future.

Eric's response: Well I am afraid delivering a full presentation of such examples is a bit beyond the scope of the "Ask Eric" column. But I will say that it is awfully easy to pick such examples. Start with the famous Windows™ requirement to select [Start] to stop the computer. And don't forget inconsistencies like the placement of the settings facilities variously under File, Edit, View, and Tools. There are plenty of examples.

February 10, 2005 – submitted by Afshin Behnia of USA

Question: In an application software company, would you recommend that the responsibility of human factors and Interface design rest with the engineering team or with the product management team (or perhaps another team altogether), and why?

Eric's response: The problem with the software engineering team is that they tend to care about using the latest technology, getting it out on time, and having software that does not crash. They don't usually care that much if people can use the product. It is usually the product or marketing group that is focused on the success of the product with users. They usually have the vision. The usability people are the ones that translate the vision into specifications. They are the bridge between the vision and the programmer. It is usually better to have them "owned" by the vision holder.

January 21, 2005 – submitted by Nan Nikita of Calgary, Canada

Question: I am an undergrad student in Computer Science. I want to do a research project on cell phone interface running Symbian OS - S60 platform. Can you give me any suggestions on some specific issues that would be great to research on?

Eric's response: There are SO many interesting aspects of phone design. It is a classical case of a very complex application with a limited bandwidth interface. Not enough buttons and a small screen. What a nightmare!

We are currently doing some interesting work at HFI in the ways of entering 2-byte languages on the cell phone. Another area for study is how to transverse menus and still maintain context. It even gets MORE interesting when we try to present Web information on a cell phone.

January 20, 2005 – submitted by MeLisa Stinson of USA

Question: I am seeking information as to whether Microsoft.net is a good choice for business Web site development?... any input?

Eric's response: Frankly, selecting .NET has very little impact from a usability perspective. .NET does not really provide any extra user-focused capabilities as far as we can tell. It is therefore an issue of coding efficiency and back end integration. To my surprise and disappointment .NET does not seem to have offered ANYTHING to really help users or to improve the usability of designs.

January 4, 2005 – submitted by Abhishek Bali of New Delhi, India

Question: Hi Dr. Schaffer. I have a thought to share with you, and that gives rise to a query that only you can answer, from where you see the phenomenon of the Web today and its future.

The instance the Web was conceived, what the designers did was put information on the Web just like our newspapers do on paper. Agreed that this was done since people were accustomed to them and the usability concern was definitely there, but suppose, from the day of its conception, the Web was purposefully designed as a tool for enhancing the power of the mind!

I know the purpose of the Web was different and it would have been "myopic" to do so, but what I want to ask finally is, are there examples of certain features that fail when under the lens of usability testing but rather, when introduced in the Web, enhance the capability of the mind? Or, Could there be a "laterally" different architecture possible for some of the Web sites that we see today. Like we have this "Mental Mapping" technique of taking effective notes on paper, can a Web site be designed so radically differently that the user is sort of hypnotized into the intent of the Web site?

Eric's response: While there is some great work on persuasive technology, actual hypnotism of users seems a bit unlikely.

We don't need radically different designs. All the really "different" designs that I have seen have been cool, different, and much WORSE. It is almost the definition of "different" that it is unconventional. Unconventional things are unexpected and thereby hard to use.

What we need are designs that fit with our users' mental models and population stereotypes. That is, they work as expected. Perhaps they may somewhat extend the user's mental model. That is fine. But this needs to be done gently. The facilities must provide great value. The CONTENT may be very cool and unconventional. But the OPERATION of the facility should be simple and commonplace.

The Web will change. Forrester Research is correct when they predict an X-Internet. The Internet will no longer be about Web pages. It will be downloaded applications. But these applications too must map to the user's mental model.

It is fine to experiment with radically different designs in our research. But most of these will be worse.