May '96 Meeting ReportMay '96 Meeting Reportby Craig Cardimon, Data
Analyst
Knowledge Express Data Systems (Berwyn, Pennsylvania)
At the May 21st meeting held in King of Prussia, Dr. Charles Kreitzberg, President of Cognetics Corporation, discussed his firm's Quality Usability Engineering (QUE) design methodology. Why is software so hard to use? he asked.
More money is put into information technology as a capital investment than anything else other than real estate. But while you might think computers have made everything easier and faster, the reverse is usually true. Usable information technology helps move processes along three times faster than doing things the old way, manually. But working with cumbersome technology just makes things worse.
No one would even think of building a plane, train, or car without human factors design engineering. Almost no one, however, thinks of building software with it. Unforeseen or unmet user needs cause 80% of the problems in software. Human factors analysis would help solve those problems, but analysis is usually the first thing to go when budgets and schedules are cut.
The average software program contains 40 usability flaws. Half of these flaws are related to the graphics and are easily corrected. The other half involve the concept matrix itself, the design architecture. If just the "easy" problems are fixed, there is an immediate 50% increase in usability. Doing things the right way costs nothing more, said Kreitzberg, but you gain clarity in both the concept and the product.
The software team usually has two polar-opposite halves--marketing and programming--forcibly joined in the middle by a project leader who usually comes from either marketing or programming. If the project leader comes from marketing, the programmers are not happy, and vice versa. This often creates a situation where user needs are analyzed poorly or are mapped to programming requirements poorly. Many times, there is not a clear picture of who the user is, or what the user's needs or likes are.
The QUE design methodology has six stages:
Usability is not a characteristic of the software program itself, Kreitzberg said, but is, rather, a function of the user's work flow. Usability should be integrated as part of an overall performance-support environment. If you do something wrong, you should get an alert, or a wizard, or just-in-time Help.
The online help users receive should be adjustable depending upon their individual skill levels and task accomplishment. Usability should encompass the needs of the user at each stage of their entire work process. Kreitzberg calls it "full spectrum usability." The software interface should be customized to a particular work process. There should be a seamless integration in usability regarding the user's migration from novice to power user.
Copyright 1996 STC Philadelphia Metro Chapter
The Meeting Reports editor is
Emily Skarzenski.
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