Usability
Mission: Make things simple for your users and cost effective for your developers
Conducting usability analysis of an application or website can involve a variety of tools and techniques. Deciding which to use depends on your budget, timeline and priorities.
Overview of the usability testing process
The process breaks down into three phases:
- Phase 1: Needs Assessment - Do field studies, interview users about what they need and want
- Phase 2: Design and Requirements Review - This is a broad brush first draft of functions, piece by piece
- Phase 3: Application Testing - Methods of testing code from the viewpoint of customers
Detecting failures and defects before your product comes to market
We typically find that the fast feedback afforded by testing code from the user’s viewpoint is a key to detecting problems quickly, reducing risk and rework. You save time and money and have a cleaner, more user-friendly product as a result.
For example, a recent project revealed that the marketing department of a company had come up with 10 “must-have” features for an application. This was way beyond the scope and budget they had. When we interviewed users in the field, they only needed 4 of those features - meaning that the product could be delivered on time and on budget.
Make sure your application testing is about the user’s needs and you’ll save time and money.
Create several personas
A persona acts as ’stand-in’ for a real user and help guide decisions about functionality and design. Personae are based on information gathered from marketing surveys, customer service reps, sales people and any other contacts you have with your customers.
Below is a sample persona for a new reporting application
This persona describes, Sue, a 54 year old nurse that works for a pharmaceutical company. From her persona, you can get a feel for her goals when using this new reporting application. She wants to avoid feeling stupid, likes to be a leader on her team and wants this new application to save her time in completing paperwork.
Sue works at home and travels to various sites to visit Doctor’s Offices. She manages a team of 6 people and has to keep track of all their field activities and report to her line manager. She has seen a lot of administrative changes in the past three years and isn’t enthusiastic about yet another change in the system.
She’s been told she will be able to consolidate several other, smaller reports into this one updated form. She wonders if she will be able to capture all the data she needs to evaluate her staff and report accurately on their work. She will ask for help, if needed, but wants to be seen as a “can do” employee who is self-sufficient.
Benefits of persona creation
Defining the different personae allows development teams to stand in their users' shoes. The team can then focus design efforts on supporting user goals, instead of the ideas from team members or senior executives.
Introducing persona analysis into your website or application process will bring a number of benefits:
- It creates a common point of focus for the team
- Personae are quick to develop and replace the need to canvas the whole user community
- They help avoid the trap of building what users ask for rather than what they will actually use
- Design efforts can be prioritized based on each persona
- Evaluations can be made against each persona, reducing expensive usability tests