Aspire together with our customer, Biz-LX™ is organizing an informative webinar where we discuss the journey of building a software solution using Web 2.0 tools such as RIA and mashups, and demonstrate the benefits of such an exercise with a real-time case study.

In this webinar you’ll learn:

- Techniques used to design software solutions to allow better usability
- How to evaluate and select Web 2.0 techologies suitable for your software?
- The business benefits and implications of applying Web 2.0 designs to your software solution

Date: Thursday, Nov 19, 2009
Time: 11:00 AM ET/04:00 PM BST/ 09:30 PM IST

Regsitration is FREE!

Click here to register:

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/587477833

Panelists:

Dave Strite
Chief Information Officer, Biz-LX™

Elango Kanakaraji
Head – Web 2.0 Specialization, Aspire Systems

Here are some excerpts of the interview:

In the recent past, you’ve built engineering teams for 2 startup SaaS companies – what do you look for when building these teams and what were the major challenges you’ve faced?

John: I have been very fortunate in my career to have worked with a lot of talented people. Early in my career I worked at Lotus Development on products like 1-2-3 and Lotus Notes and was able to learn a lot about how great teams are put together and, equally important, how energy, excitement, and motivation is maintained while working on projects.

Putting together a great team in any company starts with having a clear understanding of your goals, looking out from 3 – 24 months. From this understanding you build an understanding of your needs, enough to recognize the skills required. From an individual perspective, the keys are character and skills. The key attributes that I look for include:

• An expert understanding of the skills required for the job. If I need a C# developer with 5 years of experience and knowledge of MVC I expect to hire people with those skills.
• I look for past examples of flexibility in their job roles. In startups you will be challenged to fill many roles, not just the one you were originally hired for. I love these challenges; you learn a lot and become a much more rounded individual. However, not everyone thrives under these conditions.
• I look for ethics and honesty. I want to work with people who can be honest about their failures, their shortcomings. When I ask people if they agree with a course of action I expect honesty. I will never know all the answers and I want people who are unafraid to speak up for the betterment of the team.

The most difficult thing in a startup environment is to bring enough attention to team and personnel development. I preach the importance of these things, I believe in these things, and I do better than many people I know. However, I find it very difficult to meet my own personal standards on this front. The challenges are varied, ranging from lack of money for training, lack of time for focusing on individual goals. At the end of the day this is an area where I know I want to focus more energy.

Is software usability a true differentiator when it comes to enterprise products?

John: Yes, and no. Many enterprise products are more difficult to use than they should be. Businesses will often have usability as a single item on a long checklist of features, and will sacrifice it over some other critical features. As some Enterprise products are commoditized, however, you see a stronger emphasis on usability arising, as it becomes more important when product pricing brace to the bottom.

From a software engineering perspective, what are the key things you would focus on to build highly scalable software?

John: As with everything else you need to understand the corporate goals and expected growth patterns for your software. While there are no one-size-fits-all rule that I would provide I would always urge focusing on database scalability first. It’s easier to scale web servers than database servers. From a performance perspective, however, I often see the biggest performance bottlenecks arising client-side with an over-use, or incorrect use, of AJAX capabilities. It is easy to bring the browser to a crawl if you are not diligent in your coding and testing efforts.

Read the full interview

1. Know your end user and their working environment: Find out how the software you are developing will be used and get to know the end-user’s working environment. Look at the product from the end user’s perspective and use the existing product yourself to get a better idea. If possible, try to interact with the end user on certain functionalities to understand his/her expectations of the product.

2. Know the data that you are going to present to the user: Consider the volume of data, how the user is going to use the data (e.g. reports, graphs, etc.) while designing the user interface. This will impact the kind of controls you would choose to present the information and how the user would utilize the information.

3. Keep the UI simple: Show only useful and relevant information to the user. Do not clutter the screens with too many controls, buttons and other widgets. Think about how to present the information (data) in a powerful way to the user (e.g. grids, images, graphs etc.).

4. Navigation is important: Simpler the navigation – faster the task accomplishment. Provide clear entry and exit points for different functionalities. Ensure that the user can return to the appropriate location of the page from where the last action was taken. Make your navigation flexible to accommodate future requirements (e.g. tabs).

5. Be Consistent: Consistency in both appearance and behavior enables users to build an accurate mental model of the way the application works and accurate mental models lead to lower training and support costs. Use templates and a consistent approach while designing screens.

6. Create a match between your application and the real world: Always use words, phrases, and concepts that are familiar to the user. For example, say “Patient Chart” instead of “Patient Database Record”, show calendar icon for dates and so on.

7. Use standard GUI controls without altering their behavior: Users know how to use standard GUI controls. Do not change their behavior for your requirements. Avoid the usage of non-standard GUI controls, whenever possible. Position the controls for easy usage and group them properly.

8. Design for minimum inputs required from the user: Ensure that common inputs are required only once from the user. Do not ask the users to do more work for data entry, retrieval of information and operations. Spend more time on programming and minimize the user’s work (wherever possible, pre-populate the data).

9. Keep your user informed: Always let the user know what is happening in your application by providing appropriate feedback. When the user performs an action, provide feedback to indicate that the system has received the input and is operating on it. For example, if the user is deleting critical data, ask for confirmation before deleting the data. Make sure that the error messages use simple language, states the problem and provide solutions so that the user can fix the problem.

10. Expect that the user makes mistakes: Ensure that no matter what the user does,they can’t mess up. If they make a mistake, provide a mechanism to undo these mistakes and ensure that data is protected.

11. Consider technology impacts on UI design: Consider implementation techniques like Ajax, multiple image/content servers, personalization techniques to make the user experience pleasant.

12. Do time-study: User should be able to access important areas of the application with minimum amount of time and effort. Provide multiple paths to the user for all the important areas of the application. Do a time study on how the user would use your screens.

13. Do Hallway testing: Bring 2-3 people to play around your product and observe carefully, without commenting, while they are using it. Listen to their feedback – what they say and what they don’t.

Aspire Systems hosted a webinar on the importance of Usability Engineering this month. A customer who implemented usability engineering and reaped substantial benefits from the same, shared his experience during the webinar. Some other key take-aways from the 1 hour session:

* Fundamental guidelines for improving product usability

* Technology enablers for usability

* The Usability life cycle in product design

* How better usability can boost your sales and lower your support costs

The recorded webinar can be viewed by registering here

Myth 1 – Usability is expensive

Among the most common myths is that usability engineering (UE) is expensive, as many big software firms invest millions in setting up UE labs and they pay usability professionals highly. But what project managers and stakeholders fail to realize is that not every firm needs to invest so much. Usability methods are flexible and can be scaled up or down according to the situation. User tests can even be run in a spare conference room and existing staff can be taught how to conduct tests. Food for thought – on an average, best practices call for spending 10% of a design budget on usability.

Myth 2 – No scientific base for testing

This myth is based on the fact that only few users are utilized in a usability test. It’s assumed that based on few people’s observation, potential problems with the product can’t be uncovered. But a number of studies have shown that just 6 to 8 users typically uncover 80% of the problems with a given interface.

Myth 3 – Usability engineering delays the launch date

This is again a very common myth that surrounds usability. Usability need not be on a grand scale starting from entire user-centered design process followed to the letter and field studies. It can be as simple as paper prototyping and can allow you to go through several different design iterations in a few hours. One of the main benefits of letting user research drive design is that testers don’t have to spend time on features that users don’t need and can focus on resources to ship the product on time.

Myth 4 – No problems=No usability engineering

Though it may look as if there are no significant user-interaction problems reported for a product, it really may not be so. In many instances, users simply don’t report problems or at times problems are misinterpreted. Whatever the reason, unless the software firm does scientific research to gather user interaction data it’s not possible to know what the real problems are or if there are problems.

Myth 5 – We have already adopted usability engineering

There are many software firms who assume that verification tests, market trials, and a feedback form when a product releases are a part of usability testing. Just by interacting with a group of potential users and gathering user data doesn’t result in real user interaction testing. You need to get users early into the picture and ask them to use the software to complete certain tasks, without being told how to. The product is then rated based on how successful users are in completing those tasks. Issues are identified during these sessions and the product is improved based on the further recommendations.

The value of usability engineering and the role of the usability engineer are still not very well understood but it’s important to know that usability is an integral part of software quality and the correct usability methods are cheap, easy to implement, and won’t delay your project.

Read the entire digest contents

For a software product to be usable, one needs to think about how and why people use a product. Understanding the user’s goals in the context of their environment and letting that determine the design is the first step to creating a usable product.

Usability engineering is an approach that puts the user, rather than the system, at the center of the process. Understanding the needs of users early is important to maintain the consistency of internal design of the software. Getting feedback through end-users’ interaction with the software at every stage and iterating based on observing users use the system is key to developing highly usable products, rather than relying on just designers’ experience.

Adoption of usability engineering throughout the development process gives users a chance to deliver feedback on the design before the product is released. Which means that even minor issues are rectified before it’s too late.

Experts believe that developers and designers should include certain essential usability characteristics for developing successful software. Interfaces are typically evaluated against a combination of these characteristics to determine how successful and satisfactory they are:

• Effectiveness – completeness and accuracy with which users achieve specified goals.
• Efficiency – speed (or accuracy) in which users can complete the task for which they use the product.
• Low Error Rate – ensures that users make fewer and easily rectifiable errors while using the system, and no catastrophic errors occur.
• Learnability – allows users to swiftly begin working with the system
  Satisfaction – makes the system a pleasure to use.
• Memorability – permits user to return to the system after a period of non-use without having to relearn everything.

Why should a development team adopt usability engineering?

• Increases productivity – allows users to focus on the tasks they want to complete with fewer distractions.
• Decreases training costs – usable systems require less training. In addition, usability testing can also identify the areas you need to focus on during training.
• Reduces development time and costs – missed requirements, workflow and design issues are identified earlier in the design meaning less cost to implement.
• Boosts sales and revenues – usability can help differentiate your software from those of your competitors. If two products are considerably equal in utility, the product with more usability will be regarded as superior.

Usability and user-centered design are iterative and typically proceeds in a cycle of hypothesis and evaluation. When followed correctly, design solutions build in richness and completeness and can provide a great user experience.

Read the entire digest contents