Group 10 Lab 4 Joakim, Xu and Azadeh
Question When new functionality and technology is introduced to a product that users have been familiar with, there is always a learning curve and training cost for the users. Are there any methods or guidelines for handling the trade-off between introducing new functionality and the training costs that it brings? Group 7
Answer Stage 1: New type of products: ( Users willing to pay for learning and are tolerant to usability problems, calculator 100$ ) Stage 2: Competitors arrives: ( Functionality becomes the key differentiators, users will buy the one that fulfills their needs rather than the easiest to use, usability means having the correct functions, ) Stage 3: Productivity wars: ( All vendors offers more or less the same functionality, users becomes unwilling to accept a product that takes time to learn, developer strive to improve the ease of learning and speed of use by implementing wizards and on-screen instructions etc and hopefully it will result in lower support costs. ) Stage 4: Transparency: ( During this stage the price is the key differentiator, companies’ focuses on lowering production costs. An example CD-ROM ) Reference: http://www.uie.com/articles/market_maturity/
Question How does a usability engineer use the quality function deployment process? Group 15
Answer Quality function deployment (QFD) helps the engineers to transform customer needs into engineering characteristics, and appropriate test methods, for a product or service. The technique yields graphs and matrices. With QFD, the voice of customer data is reduced into a set of critical customer needs using techniques such as affinity diagrams, function analysis, etc. Quality Function Deployment begins with product planning, continues with product design and process design, and finishes with process control, quality control, testing, equipment maintenance, and training. Quality Function Deployment, by its very structured and planning approach, requires that more time be spent up-front in the development process making sure that the team determines, understands and agrees with what needs to be done before plunging into design activities. As a result, less time will be spent downstream because of differences of opinions over design issues or redesign because the product was not on target. References : http://www.npd-solutions.com/qfd.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_function_deployment
Question Should the novice user be taking into consideration so greatly no matter what that website serves for? Group 14
Answer No! The designers must understand what type of users that they are designing for in order to achieve a successful interaction between the user and the website. Novice/Expert terms refer to the cognitive and knowledge structure of target users. Novice users: no domain knowledge no task experience or expertise weak memory recall A good paper : Expert and Novice User Models and Their Application to the Design process
Should the novice user be taking into consideration so greatly no matter what that website serves for? group 14 No! The designers must understand the artifact users that they are designing for, in order to acheive a successful interaction. Novice/Expert terms refer to the cognitive and knowledge structure of target users. Novice users: no domain knowledge no task experience or expertise weak memory recall a good paper: Expert and Novice User Models and Their Application to the Design process
In projects which are using Agile methods, having a specific amount of budget and time, how can the team members make room for user engineering? group 8 Even using non-agile methods, there is always a specific amount of budget and time. It's generally the same old feature and cost trade-off problem and many factors can affect it, but user engineering is not an option to be added or removed, its an essential part of any successful project. Team members may find some shortcuts or creative ways to save some time and money.
Are there any methods to justify the expense of the usability investment during the usability engineering? How to convince business individuals to apply UCD in their product development? group 7, 15 This is the matter of proving the "Usability of a UCD Approach", you need to show them the costs and benefits of a UCD approach comparing to a traditional waterfall life-cycle. Measurements are needed on the efficiency and satisfaction on these two. Or if you don't have enough time to run this process just refer them to some good papers which show the same results.
Assuming that the development of an application is in in Phase 2 of its progress and the Usability Engineering life-cycle cannot entirely be applied. Can UCSD be applied at this time and build upon possible mistakes done in the analysis of requirements? Should they rather conduct a task analysis first and start at the beginning of the usability engineering life-cycle? If yes, how can this be matched with the present result of the development? group 13 , 14 As it was told in some lectures, the cost of change in the early phases of a project is much less, so its better to discover and fix those mistakes in phase 2 rather than phase 4. A migration plan with the minimum cost from a non-UCD method to a UCD method can be like this: Make a prototype of the whole knowledge-base up to know, assume it the developement phase in the first iteration, and go according to the UCSD method for the rest.
Do you think there are methods that does not give these amazing ROI that they are talking about in the paper? Can you go wrong ROI-wise when focusing on the users? group 6 One reason for introducing the iterative methods was that the old waterfal methods weren't so effective with the user satisfaction. A good sample of those methods can be The Standard Waterfall Model As the chapter 2 of readings for lab 4 says, you can't go ROI wise when you apply UCSD: UCD -> user satisfaction -> more users -> more benefit
Customers do not return if they do not have a good initial experience with the websites. These sites and organizations can go under quickly without a second chance. Which usability engineering methods can be used to avoid a situation like this? Group 13 Usability testing, the gold standard, is when participants are recruited and asked to use the actual or prototype interface and their reactions, behaviors, errors, and self-reports in interviews are carefully observed and recorded by the Usability Engineer. On the basis of this data, the Usability Engineer recommends interface changes to improve usability.
Find two webpages with the same purpose, but where one has good and one has a bad design? group 11 From a UCSD point of view we picked and compared these two: Nordea Swedbank The "international students" target user group would prefer Swedbank, because it serves in English language which Nordea lacks.
A web site prototype was designed and eight physicians were paid to participate in usability testing. Within 45 seconds of starting their first search task, seven out of the eight physicians gave up. Could and should the test have been carried out in a different way that would have prevented the participants from giving up so easily? group 11 Definitely could, but we should see what was the intension of the test, was it "measuring the impact of usability on being used" or "longer use of a system by users". The usability test is applied to show the efficiency of the product and in this case it showed that the designed search application is not usable.
What's metrics and evaluation tools, how to affect UI design? ---group 11
Metrics: Formal measurements that are used as guides to the level of usability of a product. Metrics include how fast a user can perform a task, number of errors made on a task, learning time, and subjective ratings. You can't manage what you can't measure ——Peter Druckers establish a set of metrics for the project to gauge the success later on
Evaluation tools 1. Always ask developers to do evaluation by using guidelines and cognitive walkthrough. + not costly + find problems in the early phase + there is no need for developers to wait for the results from UI specialists 2. When user interface specialists are available, ask them to do the heuristic evaluation. + UI specialist can find more serious problems in the interface + benefits & cost rate -- UI specialists are hard to find -- report many not so important problems 3. When having enough budget and time, do usability testing. + good at finding serious problems -- but not much as heuristic evaluation -- too expensive -- time consuming -- done by UI specialist, have same problems with using heuristic evaluation
Reference http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article4958.asp http://oldwww.acm.org/perlman/question.html http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~pancake/cs552/discussions/wang.j.html http://miskeeto.com/bytes/developing-ux-strategy/
Recommend
More recommend
