Participatory User Interface Design November '98 Meeting

Meeting Leaders: Francie Fleek and Wayne Keyser Francie Fleek is a Senior Usability Analyst in the Performance-centered Design Department at SMS, where she pioneered the creation and establishment of their usability processes. She holds a Master's degree in Technical and Scientific Communication from Drexel University of Philadelphia, PA, and is a strong advocate for creating software that is highly usable and productive. Wayne Keyser is a User Assistance Analyst in the Performance-centered Design Department at SMS, where he consults with developers and writers on the design and implementation of new user interfaces and user assistance. He has a background in psychology and is interested in understanding users' motivations and the social interactions between humans and computers. written by Anne Marie Jackson Originally published in News & Views December 1998 issue. Copyright 1998 STC-Philadelphia Metro Chapter. For permission to reprint this article, contact the Managing Editor.

On the first Saturday in November, Francie Fleek and Wayne Keyser of Shared Medical Systems (SMS) led a workshop on accessing users' input for software development. SMS has been developing health care software for thirty years and has 7,000 employees worldwide. Francie and Wayne are from the Performance-Centered Design group at SMS, where usability has received serious focus, especially since the opening of their usability lab in May of 1997. The participatory user interface design process is a set of procedures that allows the software developers, documentation specialists, and users to work as a team to produce software that will really work for the user. Why is it important? Customers are satisfied because they have participated in making software that will work for them. Instant feedback from talking face to face is faster than writing and waiting for a reply. More ideas and better ideas arise from partial ideas when people are stimulated in live discussions. The average GUI has forty flaws. Correcting the twenty flaws most easily fixed yields an average improvement in user efficiency of 50%. GUIs designed with usability in mind from the beginning yield user efficiency improvements of up to 720%. Eighty percent of software revisions are due to unmet or unforeseen user requirements. It costs $1 to add a feature in design, $6 to add it during development, and $60 to $100 to add it after the software is released. How participatory user interface design works Understand the user's task flow first-hand Visit the users in their own environment. Observe the workflow and how equipment and people are organized. Examine work orders or any tasks that are done on paper. Learn what the user's tasks are. Practice using open-ended and specific questions to draw the user out, and then let the user share. After this visit you should be able to make a short statement that describes the goal of the product with specific and measurable usability objectives. Planning sessions Involve about six participants to meet from one to four days. Include at least two users, plus a combination of systems analysts, programmers, trainers, and technical writers. When you meet, encourage an informal atmosphere. Use a round table and supply tons of low-tech tools such as pencils, erasers, stickies, index cards, and copies of blank screens on paper. Encourage your participants to write down ideas and freely toss them over their shoulder for the next try. First, determine task flow: Use a noun and a verb to represent each task. Write the "blue sky" together. This is wishful thinking, where the papers should be flying. All of the ways the users would like to accomplish the task should be identified here. Determine a realistic task flow. Test it with examples from users' everyday work life. Post these stickies on large newsprint paper as a flow chart. Next, create a paper prototype of the screens that would accomplish the identified tasks. Finally, test the paper prototype against the task flow with user work scenarios. Evaluation After the programming is done, involve the user again in testing the software. Use an iterative approach wherein the software is refined and retested repeatedly. The workshop included two breakout sessions and a tour of the SMS usability labs. SMS has two testing suites, each comprising a small conference room, a large room for the planning sessions and testing, and an observation room with TVs to monitor the tests. However, we don't need to have expensive equipment to achieve the essence: meeting with the users and observing their software needs and their reactions to what we have produced. Where to go from here Rubin, J., Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests. Wiley, New York, NY, 1994. Beyer, H. and Holtzblatt, K. Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs. Morgan Kaufman, 1997. www.useit.com, a good site with tips for guerrilla usability tactics.

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Last updated: December 4, 1998 (dls)