How to design and test for usability

How to design and test for usability

 A series of roundtables on the subject of usability. The first roundtable took a

• High level view of the area
• Investigated the importance of usability
• What barriers there are to it being implemented
• How it can be imbedded into the development process

The second meeting assumed that the

• Importance was understood
• The barriers had been removed
• Concentrated on the question "How to design and test for usability?"

The roundtable was made up of

• Representatives of academia
• Large enterprise
• Web development
• Internet psychology
• Journalism
• Usability testing

These conclusions came out of the discussion of four questions:

• How to collect usability requirements?
• How to design for usability?
• What usability testing is needed?
• How to run usability testing?

Requirements Gathering

At the highest level the System Usability Scale defines general usability requirements, a system must be:

• Effective (the user can successfully achieve their objectives).
• Efficient (with the least amount of time and effort).
• Satisfactory (the user must be satisfied, and delighted, by the experience).

Design

The detailed design of the system must ensure that the user can easily do what they need to. The design can be divided into: navigation, process and look and feel.

Navigation

To help design the system the developer should:

• Try different menu structures.
• Check user understanding of terminology.
• Provide alternative navigation techniques and potentially provide multiple routes to the same place.
• Be consistent across the system and use standard best practice

Process

It is worth trying different designs for the processes looking at form layout, amount of information processed in each step, the order of the steps, and processing of errors.

Look and feel

For a user to be satisfied it is not sufficient for the system to be ease and quick to use it has also got to look and feel good. Creative media designers can help to ensure that the system looks right and reflects the user's image of themselves as well as the branding of the supplier.

Testing

Usability and accessibility testing should be done as part of the overall testing of the system. The usability of certain areas of the system will be more critical than others, and the scenarios designed to assess the usability of the system should concentrate on these areas. The important areas are not just those that are used a lot but also areas where it is important that the user has a satisfactory experience; for example when an error is highlighted it is particularly important that the user can fix it easily as if they cannot they are likely to drop out and go to some other system.

Conclusion

The design, development and testing of systems are all interconnected and affect one another. Usability has to be an integral part of the development process.