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The Insighter April 2006 |
Neo Insight's e-newsletter
on Usability topics and techniques.
We invite you to subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter.
Upcoming events
Many software and Web site development managers view usability activities as adding expense and time to the development process. However, this is not the case if usability is applied early in the process. When applied early and iteratively, usability activities with a primary focus on customer requirements can have tremendous impacts whether you are creating a service for the public or for internal use. Our industry experience and similar findings in the literature indicate a number of positive impacts which come in the form of near-term returns on investment. These include:
Other impacts are less tangible, such as productivity gains and operational efficiencies, but factor into the total cost of ownership. Over the long-run, these impacts can significantly overshadow the initial return on investment. These include:
Small usability improvements during the development process can reap huge rewards when the impacts are considered across the entire product life cycle and in terms of the user’s total cost of ownership. In 1999, Nielsen summarized the impact of usability, based on 863 projects, as follows: “The magnitude of usability improvements is usually large. This is not a matter of increasing use by a few percent. It is common for usability efforts to result in a hundred percent or more increase in traffic or sales.” With the range of competition, applications, and new technologies available on the Web today, paired with the increased number of non-technical people accessing the Web, the need to make it faster and easier for people to accomplish their goals is imperative. These days usability also affects people’s perception of the company or agency, affecting brand value and market share. Software review articles often devote 20-30% or more of their content to ease of learning, ease of use, help and documentation. Also, people are becoming much more demanding about usability because they have experienced companies such as Amazon.com providing them with very usable interfaces which allow the average person to easily manipulate complex databases and engage in commercial transactions from any PC with a Web browser. The Web has extended rich technologies to people that never had access before and they have to be able to figure it out quickly or they will simply leave. How can you tell if your Web site, application, or service is up to the usability challenge? Check emails or call logs to your support group for common complaints, questions, or themes. Check your Web statistics for high proportions of people leaving your site from navigation or transition pages as opposed to content or destination pages. Do some informal testing yourself. Ask your users or prospective users if they can accomplish the kind of tasks for which your site is designed but, more importantly, also find people motivated to find information or perform their own tasks using your site and see how well those needs are addressed. This should give you a good idea if more usability testing is required. Remember, the value of usability is not just to impact the vendor or agency’s return on investment, we also need to take into account the ongoing costs of ownership and the significant impact usability can have on long-term productivity and customer success. The deadline for early registration in our Usability challenges of new Web technologies is April 28th and for our Designing usable Web-based applications workshop the deadline is May 12th, 2006. Early registrants save $100. Come join us. As you may know, Neo Insight is the Canadian distributor of Morae by Techsmith. If you are in the Ottawa area, we would be happy to come in and demonstrate Morae to your team, and talk about how we use it in usability testing. Morae is a complete portable usability lab. During a usability test, it records the screen digitally (i.e. in high resolution, unlike using a video camera), as well as recording video and audio of the user with a camera. Every user interface event is captured in a database, making it easy to extract objective usability metrics like task performance time, number of mouse-clicks, how many Web pages were viewed, etc. Observers can watch the test live on a remote computer, and add markers and comments into the recording to highlight interesting events. Morae then supports the production of video "highlights" of the tests, providing a powerful tool for communicating the impact of usability issues on users. We started out using Morae, having looked around for a solution that would allow us to take usability testing to users, rather than the other way around (often the users' work or home context plays a big part in usability). We became so enthusiastic, we worked with Techsmith to make many improvements, and were invited onto the Technical Board of Advisors. And now we distribute it in Canada, as well as continuing to use it in our day-to-day work. The latest version, 1.3, has lots of new features like zooming timelines and streamlined editing to help speed the analysis of usability test sessions, and the production of highlights videos. See more about Morae on the Techsmith Web site, including the new features in Morae version 1.3. If you would like us to give a demonstration of Morae by Techsmith for your team (approx. one hour), just give us a call on (613) 271-3001. Quote of the month Forget about the killer feature. Welcome to the age of the killer user experience. When technology achieves something desirable without being in your face, when it knows how to integrate itself into your wishes and desires without distracting from them, that's when technology lives up to its potential. Unfortunately, it's not that simple to get there. Andreas Pfeiffer If you have any comments on The Insighter, or ideas on usability topics you'd like to hear about, send us an email with your comments. We invite everyone to subscribe to the Insighter, our monthly e-newsletter. If you wish to unsubscribe, just send us an unsubscribe email. |
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