Usability for software engineers

For intranets , usability is a matter of employee productivity. Time users waste being lost on your intranet or pondering difficult instructions is money you waste by paying them to be at work without getting work done.

On average, this will more than double a website's desired quality metrics yielding an improvement score of 2. For software and physical products, the improvements are typically smaller — but still substantial — when you emphasize usability in the design process.

For internal design projects, think of doubling usability as cutting training budgets in half and doubling the number of transactions employees perform per hour. For external designs, think of doubling sales, doubling the number of registered users or customer leads, or doubling whatever other KPI key performance indicator motivated your design project. There are many methods for studying usability, but the most basic and useful is user testing , which has 3 components:. It's important to test users individually and let them solve any problems on their own.

If you help them or direct their attention to any particular part of the screen, you have contaminated the test results. To identify a design's most important usability problems, testing 5 users is typically enough. Rather than run a big, expensive study, it's a better use of resources to run many small tests and revise the design between each one so you can fix the usability flaws as you identify them.

Iterative design is the best way to increase the quality of user experience. The more versions and interface ideas you test with users, the better. User testing is different from focus groups , which are a poor way of evaluating design usability. Focus groups have a place in market research, but to evaluate interaction designs you must closely observe individual users as they perform tasks with the user interface.

Listening to what people say is misleading: you have to watch what they actually do. Usability plays a role in each stage of the design process. The resulting need for multiple studies is one reason I recommend making individual studies fast and cheap.

Here are the main steps:. Don't defer user testing until you have a fully implemented design. His work describes usability testing and how to use usability heuristics in the life cycle of usability engineering. This profession mainly draws its theories from Computer science and psychology to define problems that might occur during such a system. Testing the design at various stages of the development process with the users are done by usability experts. A usability engineer mainly focuses on the research phase rather than finding solutions for the usability problems, which is the focus of a UX or product designer.

Great usability is one of the critical factors to keep the users engaged and satisfied with the product. Usability testing is an ongoing process and a core part of the development process.

By doing constant testing, it will benefit the company from abandonment and dissatisfaction of the users. The user-interface is subject to changes in a further intermediate release, invalidating the conclusions of an incremental summative evaluation.

I hope you have a better understanding on how to implement IEC in you software development process. Remember that I'm in software above all, human factors engineering isn't my background.

Congratulations and hate comments are welcome! Edit: Templates You will also find in the templates repository page , two templates useful to generate records of your usability engineering process:. That was really useful, thx a lot. You explained the human, knowhow side of doing it, that others don't. Name or nickname :. Email address :. Website optional :. Comment :. This post's comments feed. Go to my Linkedin profile. Home Templates Guidances Contact me. Usability engineering plan Write what you do, do what you write.

The usability engineering plan describes the following topics: Input data review, Definition of use specification, Link with risk management, User interface specification, Formative evaluation protocol, Formative evaluation report, Design review s , Summative evaluation protocol, Summative evaluation report, Usability validation.

Usability input data Usability input data is a subset of design input data. Depending on the context of the project, they can contain: Statements of work, User requirements collected by sales personnel, product managers …, Data from previous projects, Feedback from users on previous versions of medical devices, Documentation on similar medical devices, Specific standards, like IEC Home use of electromedical devices, Regulatory requirements, like IFU or labeling.

Preparing the use specification The use specification is a high-level statement, which contains information necessary to identify: the user groups which are going to be subject of the usability engineering process, the use environment in which the device is going to be used, the medical indications which are needed to be explored further. The use specification shall include the: Intended medical indication; Intended patient population; Intended part of the body or type of tissue applied to or interacted with; Intended user profiles; Use environment; and Operating principle.

Preparing the use specification can make use of various methods, for example: Contextual enquiries in the user's workplace, Interview and survey techniques, Expert reviews, Advisory panel reviews. This method is the simplest to implement once again if you can afford not to use other methods :- The use specification is recorded in the usability management file. Analysis The usability engineering process is performed in parallel to the ISO risk management process.

Identifying characteristics for safety This step sounds clearly like risk management. It consists in identifying: The primary operating functions in the device, The use scenarios, The possible use errors. Identifying hazardous phenomena and hazardous situations This step consists in identifying the hazardous phenomena and hazardous situations ditto. They are identified with data coming from: The use specification, Data from comparable devices or previous generations of the device, User errors identified in the previous step.

Identifying and describing hazard-related use scenarios This step is once again risk analysis: the hazardous phenomena, the sequence of events, and the hazards, resulting of the human factors are identified. Selecting hazards-related scenarios for summative evaluation It is not required to submit all hazard-related scenarios to the summative evaluation. Identifying mitigation actions and documenting the user interface specification The risks related to the use scenarios are then evaluated according the risk management plan severity, frequency, and possibly detectability if you included that parameter in you risk management plan , and mitigation actions are identified, by following the risk management process.

Design and Formative Evaluation The formative evaluation is performed during the design phase. Summative evaluation The summative evaluation is performed at the end of the design phase. Application to agile methods The steps described above can be disseminated in the increments of an agile development process. Iterations and usability engineering The next steps of the usability engineering process are performed during iterations, as shown in the following diagram and explained in the next subsections.

Summative evaluation The summative evaluation is placed after the verification phase of the agile software development process.

Conclusion I hope you have a better understanding on how to implement IEC in you software development process. Edit: Templates You will also find in the templates repository page , two templates useful to generate records of your usability engineering process: Usability Engineering File , Usability Summative Evaluation Plan and Report.

Comments 1. On Tuesday 17 December , by Hobber That was really useful, thx a lot. Links Go to MD website. Contact me Contact me. Home Archives.