Measuring Usability in Requirements | December 20th, 2006
Measuring usabiltiy…well we’ve been down this road before. But I like how Roger Cauvin is approaching it here:
- Profile. A typical user’s prerequisite skills and experience.
- Effort. A limit on the number of user gestures (keystrokes, mouse clicks, etc.) it should take to accomplish a functional task.
- Duration. A limit on the amount of time that it will take a typical user to perform the functional task.
Alexei and I chatted about this post for a bit and pondered how feasible it is to set something like effort based on gestures or duration. This can’t be fixed values but rather minimums or ranges to complete a task. For example I can complete a given task in 4 clicks, on reasonably in 15 secs. But there is going to be variance for sure. The good thing is it forces designers and developers to care about what the user is going through and quantify it, at very least we could measure improvement from a previous version of software. Furthermore it gets the team thinking about issues that matter to the user, this kind of thinking can’t be overdone IMO.
Technorati Tags: usability, requirements, productmanagement, user, ux, ui, software,
February 24th, 2007 at 9:51 am
You (as well as Roger Cauvin in his post) focus on *criteria* for measuring usability. What seems to be missing is the tool support. I am not an expert on HCI but still I am not aware of any half decent/popular tools that allow you to automate collecting these metrics. This stuff needs to be incorporated into the run-of-the-mill user interface testing practices.
As far as I am aware UIs are automatically tested these days just to confirm that a feature is reachable/executable without much emphasis on usability. Usability testing is in effect delegated to humans (e.g. beta testers, users). I think UI testing could become a lot more useful if usability testing becomes an integral part of it. Recording mouse-clicks and time taken to complete a particular task could have noticable impact on application layout and how the screen real estate is managed, which can only be a good thing. If this is then fed back to app developers by means of a few useful reports (e.g. JUnit for example) that would certainly be welcomed, IMHO.
Thanks for the interesting points.
March 8th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Well ask you you shall receive Dima. Keep an eye on my blog for an interesting in this vein coming from Nitobi very soon:)