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Special Interest Group (SIG)
SIG #3: Usability Test Results:
'Avoiding the road to nowhere'
Facilitated by Steve Fadden and Nicki Shovar, PeopleSoft
Wednesday, 5:30 to 6:30
SIG outline and description
Usability test results are often communicated to product development and business team members through the publication and distribution of a report. But what happens next? In this SIG discussion, we will explore approaches to facilitate acceptance of usability test results and implementation of usability enhancements.
Description:
Usability testing affords practitioners the opportunity to identify problems associated with the products being tested. As usability issues are identified, practitioners write up reports describing the problems and associating them with a level of severity and/or priority. The severity of a usability problem often ranges from a minor concern, such as a cosmetic inconsistency in the style in which something is displayed, to a critical one, such as an interaction that destroys data or prevents users from completing their tasks.
Depending on the nature of product development process incorporated by an organization, usability test results may be accompanied by enhancement recommendations that can be made to improve the usability of the product, or they may serve as a starting point for the team to investigate how to best address the problems.
Regardless of how usability test results lead to usability enhancement recommendations, many usability practitioners find themselves faced with two key questions:
1) How do I convince the product team that the usability issues I've identified are truly valid and important?
2) How can I increase the chance that usability enhancements will be incorporated into the product?
In some organizations, development, marketing, and sales team members are enthusiastic about user-centered design, and project managers and executives will accommodate changes to schedules and budgets in order to incorporate usability enhancements into products. More often than not, however, team members are forced to make tradeoffs between usability and many other factors, such as time-to-market, development support, production deadlines, and new feature implementation. In some (hopefully rare) cases, team members may hear of usability problems and dismiss them completely, saying that it's simply too late to change anything, or that the product or service is so revolutionary that usability is not a concern. Given that even the most accepting team will have to make tradeoffs between usability improvements and other factors, how do you ensure that usability test results and recommendations are not the end of the product development process, but rather a step in a continuous process of improvement?
In this Special Interest Group meeting, we will discuss methods and techniques that usability practitioners can use to improve the acceptance of usability test results, and to facilitate the adoption of usability enhancements. Usability professionals from all areas are encouraged to attend, including consultants, company and government usability testers, researchers, and educators. Various methods will be discussed, with an emphasis on practical activities and techniques that can be applied immediately or with minimal investment. Participants will significantly influence the flow and nature of the discussion, although an agenda of topics will be presented for discussion.
Topics for discussion include:
- Methods that influence the development of products/services in an evolutionary manner, working within the "cradle to cradle" process associated with existing products/services and new version releases.
- Methods applied to the development of unique products/services within a "cradle to grave" process associated with a single release.
- Cost-based techniques, such as calculating ROI (return on investment), support and training expenses, and costs associated with committing errors associated with usability problems.
- Quality-based techniques, such as participating in the quality testing process and working with Quality Assurance to rate usability problems in accordance with quality criteria and incorporate them into the defect tracking process.
- Requirements-based techniques, including the development of new use cases and user needs-based requirements that include usability factors as success criteria, as well as associating usability problems with existing requirements to demonstrate that a requirement has not been met by current solutions.
- Visual development-techniques, such as working with the development team and prototyping solutions to look exactly as they should be implemented in order to facilitate resource estimations by the development team.
- Sales- and marketing-based techniques, such as working with the sales team to identify demonstration improvements that result from usability enhancements, and capitalizing on usability improvements in marketing messages.
The SIG will be conducted as a semi-structured discussion session. Participants will briefly explain their backgrounds (industry, type of products tested, common usability test methods used), and the facilitators will present each topic for discussion. After achieving agreement on which topics will be covered first, the session will follow a focus group type of format, with a facilitator first introducing and explaining a topic or technique, and participants commenting on the effectiveness of different techniques in the context of their personal experiences. During the focus group portions of the SIG, one facilitator will assume the role of "timekeeper/gatekeeper" to keep the discussion on topic, while the other facilitator will join the discussion to share techniques and experiences.
For each topic, the group will brainstorm new techniques and consider contextual factors (such as product type, development environment, group buy-in of user-centered design) that lend some techniques to be more applicable than others. Although the timekeeper/gatekeeper will prevent discussions from going over their allotted time limit, fruitful avenues of discussion may be explored beyond the time limit if the group votes to do so.
The goal for the SIG is to identify multiple techniques for increasing the acceptance of usability problems and the adoption of usability recommendations that address those problems, and identifying the contextual factors that influence when such techniques are most effective.
After the session is complete, notes will be collated, and methods and techniques will be summarized in an article. Specific methods and techniques will be presented along with the contextual factors that make those techniques better-suited for a particular context. The article will be submitted for consideration to be published in the UPA Voice or User Experience magazine.
Background:
Steve Fadden's experience includes usability testing, requirements elicitation, task analysis, interface design, and teaching Psychology and Human Computer Interaction. He is currently a User Experience Architect with PeopleSoft's User Experience group, specializing in the development and testing of enterprise and mid-market software applications. He has previously worked at Intel Corporation as a Human Factors Manager and Engineer, and at Lockheed Martin Aeronautical Systems as a Human Factors Engineer. Steve holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Nicki Shovar's 15 years of experience include usability testing, new product research and development, and teaching Marketing Research. She is currently a Usability Engineer with PeopleSoft's User Experience group, specializing in the development and testing of enterprise and mid-market software applications. She has previously worked as a new product development consultant, and as a Human Factors Engineer at Pacific Bell and AT&T Bell Laboratories. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Iowa.
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