Techvisor

The Usability Challenge

Though usability engineering isn't a direct responsibility of the CIO, a good CIO can actually help institutionalize the idea in an enterprise. by Rajendra Chaudhary

Hitesh Agrawal

As an increasing number of applications continue to adopt Web-browser based interfaces, organizations are slowly beginning to realize just how crucial usability can be for an application to be truly accepted by the users. However, this increased realization hasn't yet translated in a change in attitude while allotting time and resources for developing user interfaces (UI)—enterprises are still very conservative in that respect.

Whether it's a software application, a Web site or a user operated device, usability is one of the crucial factors that defines the success or failure of an offering. Globally, many leading corporations such as Microsoft, Apple and Google have been incorporating usability engineering into their product development cycles for years, leveraging the usability factor to gain a competitive advantage in their respective disciplines.

However, before we delve deeper, it's only fair that we lay out the basic premise and define usability for the sake of clarity. As per ISO standards, usability is "the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specified users achieve specified goals in particular environments." Simply put, it is a measure of how easy it is to use a product to perform the prescribed tasks.

When one talks about usability engineering in the context of software development, Indian enterprises are a good example of work in progress. Despite being home to some of the world's most recognized IT companies, usability engineering is an area that remains largely unexplored by Indian IT companies. To a great extent, the journey of using usability designs principles in the development of their products has only just started.

"While there is definitely more awareness about usability and user experience design in India today than there was a decade ago, the practitioners of the discipline are few and the full potential of this field is yet to be realized," said Hitesh Agrawal, Executive Director, Human Factors International (HFI).

Currently, usability engineering is still in its infancy. However, as Indian companies grow and develop contacts with global partners and clients, they are becoming increasingly aware of usability, particularly through western firms that have adopted and benefited from the discipline. A lot of Indian companies are also asked by their clients to deliver more usable designs, encouraging them to adopt a user-centric approach to software development.

"It's sad but true that the attitude of most Indian companies has been to dismiss usability as something unimportant until their customers put serious pressure on them to take notice of it," informed Agrawal. He said that many of HFI's global clients have cited lack of user-centricity as the major cause for unsatisfactory deliverables from offshore IT facilities and that they have also received requests for their expertise in training offshore developers in user-centered analysis and design.

Bring in the specialists

Hrush Bhatt Founder and Director, Product and Strategy Cleartrip.com

Responding to these demands, many firms often try to sensitize their developers towards usability design through quick-fix workshops and other similar programs, without realizing that the "crash course" approach is not enough for developing user-centered designs.

This is because most programmers and application developers tend to be ill-equipped to build good user interfaces. They are simply not schooled enough in the fine art of UI designs during their training in software engineering. Most of the courses do little more than pay lip service to UI design. Undergraduate students generally have only a very basic exposure its tenets.

Consequently someone who is new to the field tends to think of UI design only in terms of the mechanics of building an interface, getting the right framework and designing around the limitations of the toolsets at hand. Majority of their time is spent just on getting the UI to work and in designing one that satisfies the flow as defined in client documents detailing requirements.

Contrary to this, people trying to use the interface, i.e. the users, don't particularly care how the interface was built, nor are they bothered about the limitations in the underlying technologies that were employed to build it; they simply want something that they can use without much trouble.

"It is this difference that separates an ordinary, working interface from a good user interface. A good design is always about delivering what the user wants. Unfortunately, most user interfaces tend to be designed around building something that satisfies a series of discrete requirements," said Hrush Bhatt, Founder and Director, Product and Strategy, Cleartrip.com.

While getting programmers acquainted with the basics of usability and importance of user-centered designs can definitely help improve things, it is worth noting that these are extremely specialized skills, and so it's critical that organizations recruit people that come from a usability engineering background.

"A programmer isn't necessarily a usability expert. usability is a highly specialized discipline that requires a professional trained to follow a user-centered design process. You don't go to your software engineer and ask him or her to apply logic and common sense and also make something usable. It won't work. Usability design is a separate engineering discipline," asserted Eric Schaffer, founder & CEO, HFI.

Good CIOs do more

Programmers with limited abilities is just one of the many problems hampering the cause of usability. Another reason why usability is often missing from a product is the fact that in most software projects it isn't paid much attention. Most software development projects think of it an expensive, resource-hungry and time-consuming exercise. While all three aforementioned factors tend to play their part in working against usability, the bit that affects it the most is the finance. Most companies say that the users/customers are their foremost priority, but the budgetary allocations for addressing user-related issues tell another story. It is issues like these that CIOs can help tackle, thereby benefiting the product, the users and the organization as a whole.

"Good CIOs and CTOs deliver more then just operating code," said Agrawal." They understand that they are delivering solutions that must meet user's needs and give the user an optimal experience. Smart leaders provide more value then just programming."

According to Agrawal, user experience is an overarching experience—emotional and physical—that a person has as a result of his or her interactions with a product or service. It is the ultimate determinant of success. This is what exceptional CIOs and CTOs understand and strive to inculcate, not just in their products and services, but also as a philosophy of work in their organizations.

CIOs can actually help institutionalize the idea of design usability in an enterprise, as quite often they are the instigators of a user experience effort and are tech savvy enough to understand the value in it. They can add enormous value to the business and to their delivery by adding a user experience capability.

Most large operations today have a user experience group. And CIOs often help by supporting that group and energizing it. There are in fact many levels of quality of user experience work, right from the poor 'screen beautification' approach created by untrained designers, to very sophisticated teams that include strategic and persuasive methods, as well as those concerned with classic usability.

Keep it real

What lies at the core of design usability idea is a product that is useful to the user, since usefulness is the central attribute that determines a product's acceptability. Usefulness measures whether the actual uses of a product can achieve the goals the designers intended them to achieve.

However, many a time people confuse design usability with the appearance or the looks of an offering. "I think there's a lot of confusion around design usability and what it actually means. Quite often, people get design usability mixed with the looks and visual attributes. Design usability is about getting something to work and delivering what the user is looking for," said Bhatt of Cleartrip.com.

This is why it is critical to drive home the idea of usefulness before embarking on any design engineering endeavor. And here's where the concepts of utility and usability enter. Though related, usability and utility refer to two different but equally important aspects of design engineering. For the record, utility is about ability of the product to perform a task whereas usability is essentially about whether a user can use the product to perform those tasks. Good design engineering is all about having an appropriate mix of utility and usability.

Elaborating on some of the essentials of usability engineering, HFI's Agrawal said, "On a given project you need a user centered process of innovation, so that the right offering is built. Then you need solid structural design based on the user's mental model and task flow. This needs to be followed up with detailed design based on research in the field. And finally, you need iterative usability testing to fine tune the design."

Everyone talks about optimizing user experience these days but only a handful have actually moved beyond the rhetoric and are beginning to take initial steps in that direction by paying more attention to usability engineering. However, the adoption, especially here in India, hasn't been able to keep pace with the rate at which the discipline has evolved in the last few years.

"Usability in a conventional sense is no longer enough," said Eric Schaffer, founder and CEO, HFI." There was a time a few years ago when companies could've used usability to their competitive advantage by incorporating better design in their applications, Web sites etc. Today almost every organization wanting to incorporate usability can do it."

Schaffer says that today the differentiator is whether an offering has the design which is engaging enough and intrinsically motivating to a user. Today it's about building a product around the area of emotional design by incorporating laws of reciprocation and persuasion.

In the end, usability isn't something one can do afterwards. It must be the part of the design process, defined always in terms users and what they need to be able to do. It's ultimate objective—designing a system that enables users to perform tasks they need to with ease and efficiency.

rajendra.c@expressindia.com