Fang Chen Autumn 2005

Lecture 3, usability methods

Magic roundabout

Usability Methods

http://www.swindonweb.com/life/lifemagi0.htm

http://www.swindonweb.com/life/life
ISO usability standard 9241
magi0.htm
The new roundabout (see picture) was the work of the Usability refers to the extent to which a product
Road Research Laboratory (RRL) and their solution was
brilliantly simple. All they did was combine two can be used by specified users to achieve
roundabouts in one - the first the conventional, clockwise specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and
variety and the second, which revolved inside the first, satisfaction in a specified context of user.
sending traffic anti-clockwise.
Though there have been 14 serious accidents and 80
lesser ones recorded in 32 years, that rate is less than
one would expect for such a busy junction. Most
accidents have involved cyclists and motorcyclists and
now a cycle lane running right round the outside of the
roundabout, with pelican crossings, should ensure that
the Magic Roundabout becomes as safe as it is efficient.

Usability concept
Usability
ISO 9241:
Effectiveness measures the accuracy and effectiveness (% of goal achieved)
completeness with which users achieve specified goals;
+ efficiency (time to complete a task,
or the error rate,
Efficiency measures the resources expended in
relation to the accuracy and completeness with which or the amount of effort)
users achieve goals; + satisfaction (subjective rating scale)
= Usability
Satisfaction measures the freedom from discomfort,
and positive attitudes towards the use of the product.
Usability can only be meaningful within a specific context

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Lecture 3, usability methods

Quality factors

Pleasure • Correctness
People’s emotion
Value, hope, taste, fear, etc
• Availability
• Performance
Usability
Efficiency, effectiveness, satisfaction • Security
• Ease of use
Functionality
Fulfill the appropriate functionality • Maintainability
The context and the environment in which it will be used

Usability factors Designing a Usable system

• Consistency
• Fit for use (functionality requirements) • Compatibility
• Ease of learning • Consideration of user resources
• Task efficiency • Feedback
• Error prevention and recovery
• Ease of remembering Ease of use
• User control
• Subjective satisfaction • Visual clarity
• Understandability • Prioritisation of functionality and information
• Appropriate transfer of technology
• Expliciteness

Principles to support usability Principles of Learnability

Learnability Predictability
the ease with which new users can begin effective
interaction and achieve maximal performance – determining effect of future actions based on
past interaction history
Flexibility – operation visibility
the multiplicity of ways the user and system exchange
information

Robustness Synthesizability
the level of support provided the user in determining – assessing the effect of past actions
successful achievement and assessment of goal- – immediate vs. eventual honesty
directed behaviour

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Lecture 3, usability methods

Principles of Learnability (ctd) Principles of flexibility

Familiarity Dialogue initiative
– how prior knowledge applies to new system – freedom from system imposed constraints on input
– guessability; affordance dialogue
– system vs. user pre-emptiveness
Generalizability Multithreading
– extending specific interaction knowledge to new – ability of system to support user interaction for more
situations than one task at a time
– concurrent vs. interleaving; multimodality
Consistency
– likeness in input/output behaviour arising from similar Task migratability
situations or task objectives – passing responsibility for task execution between user
and system

Principles of flexibility (ctd) Principles of robustness

Substitutivity
– allowing equivalent values of input and output
to be substituted for each other
– representation multiplicity; equal opportunity
Observability
– ability of user to evaluate the internal state of the
system from its perceivable representation
– browsability; defaults; reachability; persistence;
operation visibility

Customizability Recoverability
– modifiability of the user interface by user – ability of user to take corrective action once an error
has been recognized
(adaptability) or system (adaptivity)
– reachability; forward/backward recovery;
commensurate effort

Principles of robustness (ctd) some metrics from ISO 9241

Usability Effectiveness Efficiency Satisfaction
Responsiveness factors measures measures measures

– how the user perceives the rate of Suitability Percentage of Time to Rating scale
communication with the system for the task goals achieved complete a task for satisfaction

– Stability Appropriate for Number of power Relative efficiency Rating scale for
trained users features used compared with satisfaction with
an expert user power features

Task conformance Learnability Percentage of

functions learned
Time to learn
criterion
Rating scale for
ease of learning
– degree to which system services support all of
Error tolerance Percentage of Time spent on Rating scale for
the user's tasks errors corrected correcting errors error handling
successfully
– task completeness; task adequacy

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Lecture 3, usability methods
Goals for requirements analysis
• Ascertain the user’s needs
– Determine what tasks and subtasks must be
carried out
– Include tasks which are only performed
occasionally. Common tasks are easy to
identify.
– Functionality must match need or else users
will reject or underutilize the product
Goals for requirements analysis
• Promote standardization, integration, consistency,
and portability
– Standardization: use pre-existing industry standards where
they exist to aid learning and avoid errors (e.g. the W3C and
ISO standards)
– Integration: the product should be able to run across different
software tools and packages (e.g. Unix)
– Consistency:
• compatibility across different product versions
• compatibility with related paper and other non-computer based
systems
• use common action sequences, terms, units, colors, etc. within
the program
– Portability: allow for the user to convert data across multiple
software and hardware environments
Usability motivations
Different type of products has different usability
requirements :
• Life-critical systems
– Air traffic control, nuclear reactors, power utilities,
police & fire dispatch systems
– High costs, reliability and effectiveness are expected
– Length training periods are acceptable despite the
financial cost to provide error-free performance and
avoid the low frequency but high cost errors
– Subject satisfaction is less an issue due to well
motivated users
Autumn 2005
Goals for requirements analysis
• Ensure reliability
– Actions must function as specified
– Database data displayed must reflect the actual
database
– Appease the user's sense of mistrust
– The system should be available as often as possible
– The system must not introduce errors
– Ensure the user's privacy and data security by
protecting against unwarranted access, destruction
of data, and malicious tampering
Goals for requirements analysis
• Complete projects on time and within
budget
Late or over budget products can create
serious pressure within a company and
potentially mean dissatisfied customers
and loss of business to competitors
Usability motivations(cont.)
• Industrial and commercial uses
– Banking, insurance, order entry, inventory
management, reservation, billing, and point-of-sales
systems
– Ease of learning is important to reduce training costs
– Speed and error rates are relative to cost
– Speed of performance is important because of the
number of transactions
– Subjective satisfaction is fairly important to limit
operator burnout
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Lecture 3, usability methods

Usability motivations (cont.) Usability motivations(cont.)

• Office, home, and entertainment applications
– Word processing, electronic mail, computer conferencing, and
video game systems, educational packages, search engines,
mobile device, etc.
– Ease of learning, low error rates, and subjective satisfaction
are paramount due to use is often discretionary and
competition fierce
– Infrequent use of some applications means interfaces must be
intuitive and easy to use online help is important
– Choosing functionality is difficult because the population has a
wide range of both novice and expert users
– Competition cause the need for low cost
• Exploratory, creative, and cooperative systems
– Web browsing, search engines, artist toolkits,
architectural design, software development, music
composition, and scientific modeling systems
– Collaborative work
– Benchmarks are hard to describe for exploratory
tasks and device users
– With these applications, the computer should
"vanish" so that the user can be absorbed in their
task domain

Usability motivations (cont.) Properties of usability

• Social-technical systems • Usability is a property of the interaction
– Complex systems that involve many people over between
long time periods a product
– Voting, health support, identity verification, crime
reporting a user
– Trust, privacy, responsibility, and security are issues the task, or set of tasks,
– Verifiable sources and status feedback are important the environment
– Ease of learning for novices and feedback to build the goal
trust
– Administrators need tools to detect unusual patterns
of usage • The usability may change by the time

Usability testing Usability testing (cont.)

• The process of learning from users about a product’s • At different design stages, the test is
usability by observing them using a product
• Usability testing determines whether the users can find
different
and use the features in the amount of time and effort – Think-aloud test
they are willing to expend searching. – Real system
– Primary goal – improve the usability
– Real users – Prototype and mock-ups
– Do the real task – Test team
– Observation
– Analysis
• Two types of tests
– By experts
– By real users in the lab.

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Lecture 3, usability methods

Test process Lab. Test vs. field tests

• Find the users • Lab test • Field test
– Well designed – acceptability of a
• Define the task product
– Not choice
• Define the usability criteria – aim is to test whether
• Test settings a product meets
certain predefined
• Carry out the test usability criteria
• Analysis the results
However the benefits of having both types of test data
• Write the report outweigh the negative factors

Heuristic evaluation Test with real users

• Carried out by specialists • User who is expert in the application area.
• Heuristic guidelines, or self-made lists • Users review of the tasks
– For finding the missing functionalities
– Not good for finding ease-of-use problems.

Problems: It can find a lot of problems, but about 50% of

these problems are false, as they don’t cause problems to
real users. We do not know which problems are false.

5 human factors central to

Measurements
community evaluation:
• How to carry out the measurement?
• Time to learn
– How many users? How long does it take for typical members of the community to learn
relevant task?
– What tasks shall be tested (we cannot test all • Speed of performance
tasks) How long does it take to perform relevant benchmarks?
• Rate of errors by users
• Identify usability factors How many and what kinds of errors are made during benchmark
tasks?
• What to measure? • Retention over time
Frequency of use and ease of learning help make for better user
retention
• What to ask? What to observe? • Subjective satisfaction
Allow for user feedback via interviews, free-form comments and
satisfaction scales

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Lecture 3, usability methods

Understand of user’
user’s limitation Problems with subjective methods

• Questionnaires (opinion poll)

• Experience
• Knowledge – There is little correction between subjective
• Expectation satisfaction and objective performance.
• User contribution – Hard to get useful data during the
• User agreement development.
• User diversity • Score of understanding (how user believe
the system works)

Remember Universal Usability

• Usability is not: • Physical abilities and physical
– Quality assurance workplaces
– Zero defects – Basic data about human dimensions comes
from research in anthropometry
– Utility of design feature
– There is no average user, either compromises
– Intrinsic in products must be made or multiple versions of a
• Usability never was and never will be a system must be created
sufficient condition for a product or – Physical measurement of human dimensions
are not enough, take into account dynamic
service’s success measures such as reach, strength or speed

Universal Usability (cont.) Universal Usability (cont.)

– Screen-brightness preferences vary substantially,
designers customarily provide a knob to enable user
control
– Account for variances of the user population's sense
perception
– Vision: depth, contrast, color blindness, and motion
sensitivity
– Touch: keyboard and touchscreen sensitivity
– Hearing: audio clues must be distinct
– Workplace design can both help and hinder work
performance
• The draft standard Human Factors Engineering
of Computer Workstations (2002) lists these
concerns:
– Work-surface and display-support height
– Clearance under work surface for legs
– Work-surface width and depth
– Adjustability of heights and angles for chairs and work
surfaces
– Posture—seating depth and angle; back-rest height
and lumbar support
– Availability of armrests, footrests, and palmrests

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Lecture 3, usability methods

Universal Usability (cont.) Universal Usability (cont.)

• Cognitive and perceptual abilities – They also suggest this set of factors affecting perceptual and
motor performance:
– The human ability to interpret sensory input rapidly • Arousal and vigilance
and to initiate complex actions makes modern • Fatigue and sleep deprivation
computer systems possible • Perceptual (mental) load
– The journal Ergonomics Abstracts offers this • Knowledge of results and feedback
classification of human cognitive processes: • Monotony and boredom
• Long-term and semantic memory • Sensory deprivation
• Nutrition and diet
• Short-term and working memory
• Fear, anxiety, mood, and emotion
• Problem solving and reasoning • Drugs, smoking, and alcohol
• Decision making and risk assessment • Physiological rhythms
• Language communication and comprehension – But note, in any application, background experience and
• Search, imagery, and sensory memory knowledge in the task domain and the interface domain play key
• Learning, skill development, knowledge acquisition and roles in learning and performance
concept attainment

Universal Usability (cont.) Universal Usability (cont.)

• Cultural and international diversity
• Personality differences
– There is no set taxonomy for identifying user
personality types
– Designers must be aware that populations are
subdivided and that these subdivisions have various
responses to different stimuli
– Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
• extroversion versus introversion
• sensing versus intuition
• perceptive versus judging
– Characters, numerals, special characters, and diacriticals
– Left-to-right versus right-to-left versus vertical input and reading
– Date and time formats
– Numeric and currency formats
– Weights and measures
– Telephone numbers and addresses
– Names and titles (Mr., Ms., Mme.)
– Social-security, national identification, and passport numbers
– Capitalization and punctuation
– Sorting sequences
– Icons, buttons, colors
– Pluralization, grammar, spelling
– Etiquette, policies, tone, formality, metaphors

• feeling versus thinking

Universal Usability (cont.) Remember

• Users with disabilities • Usability is not:
– Designers must plan early to accommodate users
with disabilities – Quality assurance
– Early planning is more cost efficient than adding – Zero defects
on later
– Utility of design feature
– Businesses must comply with the "Americans
With Disabilities" Act for some applications – Intrinsic in products
• Elderly Users • Usability never was and never will be a
– Including the elderly is fairly ease, designers sufficient condition for a product or
should allow for variability within their
applications via settings for sound, color, service’s success
brightness, font sizes, etc.

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Lecture 3, usability methods

The changes of design The new requirement for interaction

requirements design
• Business and organizational context • In global perspective, the human-computer
• Tasks interaction studies moved from standard
• Users usability concerns towards a wide set of
problems to do with fun, enjoyment,
• Interactive devices & products aesthetics and experiences of use.

Usability and pleasurable design Changing the concept of usability

• Usability is essential for any products. • Efficiency Addictive

• Effective Cool
• The pleasant, pleasurable aspects of the • Satisfying Delightful
design will make them more tolerant of
difficulties and problems in the interface.

Questions
• What is usability? What are the motivations for the
usability requirements? why shall we consider the
usability factors in the design?

User wants User delight • What kind of aspects that an interface designers shall
consider to enhance the usability?
Pleasure • How to carryout the usability tests?
• Please discuss the positive and negative issues of
different testing methods.
User needs usability
• How to choice the right usability testing methods for a
specific design?
• How many usability aspects that an universal design
need to consider?