Activities of the Usability and User Experience Community
1999 Conference - Cincinnati, Ohio

Usability Progression: Catching the Main Currents in Usability
Monday May 17 from 2:00 - 3:30 and 4:00 - 5:30

Judith Ramey, Moderator

This Progression explores usability issues and techniques for the novice usability professional. Topics covered include: how to identify usability test issues; usability issues for visual communication; the importance of starting your project with a usability test; rating the importance of user tasks; low-cost, high-return techniques for gathering usability data; selecting participants who accurately represent your target audience; effective usability testing for the Web; conducting a heuristic review; and creating scenarios to direct design and development.  Each topic is described below.


1. How to identify usability test issues
Judy Ramey, Dept. of Technical Communication, University of Washington

The success of a usability test can hinge on the way you ask the question that you want to answer. This talk presents techniques for being sure you are focusing on your high-priority usability issues and designing your test to get data that will have the biggest potential impact on design.

2. Usability issues for visual communication
Stephanie Rosenbaum, Tec-Ed, Inc.

Visual communication is becoming increasingly important as new technologies, many of them Web-based, enable us to design information with richer visual content presented in more diverse media. This talk will explore ways that the usability specialist can explore the usability issues associated with visual communication.

3. Start your project with a usability test!
Janice (Ginny) Redish, Redish & Associates, Inc.

Most people think of usability testing as something they do AFTER they've done the documentation or interface. In fact, doing a usability test FIRST can be incredibly instructive. If you are doing a revision or new release of an existing product, start by doing a usability test of the existing version. Even if you are doing a totally new product, doing a usability test of something similar or something people like your users work with can tell writers and developers a tremendous amount about how to create products for your users.

4. Rating the importance of user tasks
Dick Miller, Hewlett Packard

How do you decide which user tasks are the most important to test for usability, include in the documentation, or make part of the training class? This progression topic gives examples of some relatively objective criteria that can be used for selecting tasks based on their importance.

5. Low-cost, high-return techniques for gathering usability data
Chauncey Wilson, WilDesign Consulting

If you are starting out as a usability specialist in a small (or even a large) company, resources for cameras, usability labs, and airline tickets to visit customers may be hard to come by. You may be caught in a loop where you have to show results to get some financing, but to get the results, you need some funding.

In this session, we will describe a variety of novel methods for collecting low-cost usability data that may help you gain the credibility for getting additional funding. These techniques include: setting up usability bug databases, sitting in on training sessions, net reviews of your products and competitors, roundtables with your support team, web feedback, training QA to spot potential trouble spots, and new hire think-aloud testing. The goal of the session will be to provide participants with at least one new (and inexpensive) method for gathering usability data that they haven't tried before.

6. Selecting participants who accurately represent your target audience
Deborah Hinderer, Tec-Ed, Inc.

Rigor in participant selection is one side of the triangle that achieves reliable data collection during usability studies. (The other two sides are thorough test design and careful test administration.) Test participants must reflect the characteristics of the intended users of a product or service; only then can you confidently generalize from their experiences and opinions to improve the product or service for its target users. This progression discusses the participant screening and s election
process for recruiting both internal and external participants.

7. Effective Usability Testing for the Web
Dee Hayes, Guidant CPI

As more and more corporations begin to see the value of an intranet, they soon realize that just making information available to its employees is not enough. The information must be presented with the user's needs in mind. Usability testing can enhance the web environment and ensure a quality experience. This progression will use examples to describe several testing methods you can use to improve your own intranet. These effective and inexpensive methods are extensible to ensure good usability of any web site, but we'll focus on the corporate intranet.

8. Conducting a heuristic review
Whitney Quesenbery, Cognetics Corporation

Heuristic reviews - a review of a work-in-progress by experts - as been widely discussed as a very effective, low-cost usability technique. This session will look at what kinds of usability flaws can be uncovered in a heuristic review, methods for collecting responses from expert participants, and how to present the findings from the review.

9. Creating scenarios to direct design and development
Barbara Mirel, Lucent Technologies, Visual Insights

Some of the best information we have on users, tasks, and work environments come from contextual inquiries. Unfortunately, using this data to positively affect design and development remains a perpetual problem. Commonly, usability investigators write up findings as scenarios. Yet the transition from scenarios to design to development is challenging, especially for
complex tasks. Complex tasks in computer-supported analysis - for instance finding the root causes of failures -- are driven by contingency and context. These factors are captured in scenarios, but more often than not the insights derived from them get dropped in write-ups of requirements for a program, its user interfaces, and documentation. The development team I am
part of has strived to avoid this problem in our scenario-based designing and prototype testing for our data visualization program. The aim of this session is to explore how to write and use scenarios effectively by discussing the following: (1) the preliminary surveys and analyses that usability investigators should conduct before going on-site to effectively observe and inquire into contexts of use; (2) ways to write task scenarios so that they highlight users' specific needs for complex tasks; (3) the written analysis that must accompany scenarios in order to serve as a design framework; and (4) ways to use scenarios throughout prototyping and evaluation and into beta testing.

10. Toys of the trade
Katherine Brennan Murphy, Tektronix

Doing usability testing in a fast-paced manufacturing facility is often challenging. You can often get permission for people to participate much easier than getting products to test with. To design a new information system and work instruction methods, we used Legos to simulate product assembly and test. Using toys actually allowed us to control the test variables better in the early testing. We also found people more eager to participate and less self conscious about mistakes when using toys rather than "real" products.

11. Special considerations for testing in a low-tech lab, room, or closet
Cherie Luckhurst, Design Intelligence, Inc.

Laboratory-style usability testing in a low-tech, non-custom facility can yield data that are both true and inexpensive to generate. This session will address the special concerns of testing in a bare-bones space that is often used when a company first starts its usability program. Topics will include room layout, recruiting & interaction with testers, data collection, and the presence of observers.

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