Seminar "What is Usability?" At the conference Internet and Business 2007
Fedor Virin: The most interesting, at least for me, report is a report on usability, and what it is about, Dmitry Satin, head of UsabilityLab.
Usability is a weird thing. There are three companies that deal with usability and only usability in Russia. These are UsabilityLab, Usethics and UIDesign. And that's it! Well, respectively, Dmitry Satin, who runs UsabilityLab, I think, is more than a worthy candidate for a story about usability.
Dmitry Satin : Thank you, Fedor! Fedor exposed me to such an eccentric, of which there are few.
Fedor Virin: Can I have two more words? I must say that since on duty, I do analytics at Mail.ru, when Yandex bought My Circle, I began to wonder what it was and registered there. I think that I know a lot of people, but Dmitry has 440 contacts there, or so! Those. this is almost more than everyone else.
Dmitry Satin: Only HRs, spammers, and I do this in My Circle, but I, unlike others, believe. The reason for this apparent popularity is that in February of this year I began to publish the Usability Bulletin. This is an open electronic edition, and you can subscribe to it, or not subscribe, but read through the RSS feed. Well, in order to attract the attention of the public, I searched the Internet for everyone who has the word usability in the description, and invited them to be his friends, and, accordingly, signed them in such a friendly and sometimes unfriendly way to the Bulletin. Now the audience of the Bulletin is already more than 10 thousand people. I hope that many of you will also become his subscribers. He comes out twice a month, there are all relevant news.
And including, in the 6th edition of the Usability Bulletin, which will be released in a couple of weeks, the video materials of what you are about to hear will be published. The fact is that two days ago, on Monday, there was an RIT conference. And I, too, was invited there as a master class. And I did there already three different events: a round table, a master class, and a presentation on the “Quality” section. Therefore, as you understand, in two days it is difficult for me to create something completely unique. Therefore, much of what I will say already exists in the record and is available on the UsabilityLab website. Therefore, if you like it, and you want to show it to your colleagues, then you can give them a link to the corresponding resource.
And the value of what I am telling you is that you can discuss with me and ask your questions that were not asked by anyone before you, i.e. get a unique experience. Here, in my opinion, there are no people in the audience who were with me on Monday, but I saw them today at this conference. Because of the intensity of conferences, the audience is mixed, and someone could hear it before.
Two more prefixing words. One in the address of Fedor, but it will be the second.
Much of what I will try to show now is part of the training courses that I teach, so this is, in my opinion, very high-quality material.
And I wanted to say thanks to Fedor, because thanks to his initiative, first of all, a usability section will be held at this conference. There will be seven reports from representatives of various companies, including those mentioned by Fedor. It seems to me that it is his great merit, and some adventurism in raising such an eccentric theme, as he himself introduced it.
The presentation, which I have already delivered to the conference organizers, contains more than 70 slides. And it is available to you. Naturally, we will not have time to discuss everything in the allotted time. I plan to show you three parts:
The sequence is chosen, perhaps, not the best. Perhaps it would be more natural to begin with definitions.
This part was planned by me as a provocation-aggressive Socratic conversation. You remember that Socrates communicating with his students, asked them stimulating questions. They sought answers to them, and so tracts were born that came to us. But I, of course, not Socrates, and you are not Plato. But I would like to provoke you to think.
I planned it mentally as a conversation with you, but there are many of you, and I am alone, so a full-fledged conversation cannot work for technical reasons.
As an epigraph here is a quote from Scott Berkun’s article “On the Strength of Usability Labs”:
- We need more savvy users!
- Not! We need more caring developers!
Much of what I am going to tell will be based on his articles, which we translated into Russian. They can also be found on the links.
Now, actually, a provocation: Are you in target?
You develop products. Are you sure that they have convenient interfaces? Of course, sure! Can we do something bad? We are all smart people. I say this without irony and sarcasm, I respect you all a priori, just as you respect me. We are all representatives of information technology, which require from us such knowledge that not many people have. We are a minority that often makes most unhappy, dictating their will to them.
Our users, despite the fact that many of us are brilliant, call our work sludge. I am a delicate person, and I try not to use shocking words. But here I saved it - these are the words of Berkun - why software sucks? So why what we develop, it turns out to be left behind? How do you know exactly what users are saying about your sites and the programs that you supply to them. And how do you decide for yourself whether what you create is convenient or not?
Why do users call our systems sludge? Well, because they seem too complicated to them. Because users do not understand how to work with them. Because programs are unstable, often break. Users say: “I'm sick! I'll go look for something simpler. " We force users to change their perception of the world, and cannot integrate our system into their life. We often offer a product and assume that the user should enjoy interacting with him. In fact, user enjoyment is beyond interaction with our product. The user wants to buy something in 5 minutes in our online store, or finish the work, write a letter, etc., and finally go to enjoy. Therefore, all we have to do is create invisible and effective interfaces that allow solving problems in a short time, pay us money for it, and can be parted forever, or can meet again if we have a competent loyalty program.
How does this work out? None of us does anything wrong. We do everything out of good intentions. I am sure that there are no professional villains among us. And we make every decision a blessing. But each of us is self-centered. What does self-centeredness mean? This is a psychological concept - when a person believes that people want the same thing as himself, what they think, just like himself, they feel the same thing as he, etc. It is more inherent in children, an adult gradually over his life overcomes this egocentrism, facing the manifestation of the fact that people are different from him, he learns to look at things with other people's eyes. But the egocentrism inherent in us from childhood remains to old age, not completely obsolete. And we often think about our users who they really are. And we consider our solutions convenient, standard or ingenious. But you need to engage the user! We need to bring him and ask what he thinks about it, and whether he can work with it. We make frequent assumptions that lead our projects astray. And our efforts turn into negative experiences of our users.
Stop guessing! Collect the data and decide whether what you are doing is good or not! If you do not conduct usability testing, but, looking ahead, I will say that usability testing is the execution of the tasks for which the product was created, by the end user in some observable environment. Usability testing can be done for $ 20, you can spend tens of thousands of dollars - it depends on the seriousness of the issues being addressed and the available means, but there are no restrictions - it is a myth that usability testing is expensive - the range is from $ 0 to infinity, if we make a nuclear power plant control interface, where the criticality of a human error is very high, it is not a sin to conduct a study lasting several months. Well, without conducting work with the user, you do not know exactly which direction you are going. Maybe not at all. And maybe you spend the effort on what the user does not need.
I, as well as you, work in many Internet projects, and I came to these ideas through some experience and in my history, in my personal history, there were moments of decision making without referring to any users. I have a lot of examples from the dating industry - the wonderful thing is the functionality of “wink”. Free, and does not imply any obligations. A man can wink at a woman - as it happens in the real world. This functionality is implemented on match.com’s industry leader. But the user comes to usability testing and asks - and how is that? And what follows - no, of course, I understand in the physical world, which means to wink, but only in your system, what will happen - I do not blink at all? Should I press a button? And as a result of this misunderstanding of this function, he either does not use it at all (that is, ignores it), or begins to abuse it, and then the support service begins to receive messages - “Do you have something there, tick with your eyes? That they all wink at me? ”Because the user, not knowing the value of this function, and where it leads, uses it incorrectly. This is just one example, when we thought of it for the user, and the user turned out to be completely unnecessary. It is necessary to conduct regular usability testing so that all our efforts are not in vain.
Prototyping is an excellent risk control tool for projects you develop. This is the second rule of usability - to develop a layout that can be checked with users before the start of serious development. There are no database structures yet - they are not defined, no lines of code are written. The prototype can be made on paper, can be made in HTML, but you have to do it a maximum in a week, or even two days - it all depends on the level of detail that follows and the tasks that the prototype faces. And immediately you get a lot of clarity - you don’t spend money before you decide whether to spend it in this direction at all or not. Combined with usability testing, prototyping allows us to save time and money.
How to improve the product and processes?
The second thing I often come across is the following position: “Good! You say very correct words, but we cannot tell our customer / management, who allocates money, to say - we need to spend more time and more money, i.e. Increase the project’s budget and deadlines in order to include you into the project - weirdo-weirdists. ” Fundamentally wrong understanding. Usability leads to a reduction in time and to a reduction in the resources required to complete the project. But in this case, however, there are curiosities. The outsourcing business is very developed in Russia and many good programmers are working on Western projects. Then the project managers tell me: “Well, actually, we are not very interested in the reduction either, because we have a crowd of programmers who need to be fed. And if the budget is suddenly reduced, then what will they do? ”In this case, we have a conflict, a strategic one, and the way out of it is to make a strategic decision - which is better: feed a team of programmers or have satisfied and loyal customers who in a short time delivered a quality product, a quality solution? I think that this is a peculiarity of Russia, but businessmen working here - in Russia, and following the budget, should certainly be interested in this to happen quickly and efficiently.
')
Why is all this necessary? Now about the money itself, I’ve talked a little bit about it. The numbers that you see on the screen: "1 dollar brings from 10 to 100 dollars of profit or savings." Each project has hidden expenses that are not planned in the budget. These are rework costs, user support costs, etc. When they determine the development budget and set deadlines, they often do not really understand that there may be two or three times more spending on this for the product to live in order to adapt it to the real world. Such figures are some of the usabilityists who, as Fedor said, are few, do not believe these figures - and this is amazing! Perhaps because they work as consultants and are not close to the business for which they work. These figures are taken from statistics, but I personally can subscribe to them, because I work for a company that, among other things, develops its projects. On Friday you will see on the reports of our section the performance of Anna Galahova from IT-Online, which will tell you how the sales plan is being fulfilled due to usability, with stagnant marketing. There we got "clean" conditions, because there were difficulties with marketing and there were successes in usability. In these clean conditions, it was very well possible to show what a huge resource is in improving the user experience and the quality of life of our user - and what he pays for it.
So, how does this happen? As I said, this is reducing development time and costs, increasing sales, increasing user loyalty (recalling one of usability metrics: productivity, efficiency, satisfaction), and reducing the hidden costs associated with reworking and endless user support.
Positive usability contribution:
Since the report was originally focused on a development conference, for RIT, here is a slide, which describes in more detail the positive contribution of usability to development, but there could be another slide at this place - why it affects sales, and so on - I think it makes no sense here again to list everything. You probably already believe me.
Impact on development:
The conclusion of the first part. Most people - and this is a quote from Scott Burkun (a UI designer from Microsoft, who grew up from a usability project manager) “Most people don’t know how to give gifts even to themselves. We do not always know how to make ourselves happy, not that of others.
Everything good in this world is created by a generous mind. If you create for others, you give them what they are willing to pay for. ”
Literature:
Scott Berkun:
http://scottberkun.it-online.ru/articles/
Aaron Marcus:
http://www.upassoc.org/usability_resources/
usability_in_the_real_world / roi_of_usability.html
Usability is a weird thing. There are three companies that deal with usability and only usability in Russia. These are UsabilityLab, Usethics and UIDesign. And that's it! Well, respectively, Dmitry Satin, who runs UsabilityLab, I think, is more than a worthy candidate for a story about usability.
Dmitry Satin : Thank you, Fedor! Fedor exposed me to such an eccentric, of which there are few.
Fedor Virin: Can I have two more words? I must say that since on duty, I do analytics at Mail.ru, when Yandex bought My Circle, I began to wonder what it was and registered there. I think that I know a lot of people, but Dmitry has 440 contacts there, or so! Those. this is almost more than everyone else.
Dmitry Satin: Only HRs, spammers, and I do this in My Circle, but I, unlike others, believe. The reason for this apparent popularity is that in February of this year I began to publish the Usability Bulletin. This is an open electronic edition, and you can subscribe to it, or not subscribe, but read through the RSS feed. Well, in order to attract the attention of the public, I searched the Internet for everyone who has the word usability in the description, and invited them to be his friends, and, accordingly, signed them in such a friendly and sometimes unfriendly way to the Bulletin. Now the audience of the Bulletin is already more than 10 thousand people. I hope that many of you will also become his subscribers. He comes out twice a month, there are all relevant news.
And including, in the 6th edition of the Usability Bulletin, which will be released in a couple of weeks, the video materials of what you are about to hear will be published. The fact is that two days ago, on Monday, there was an RIT conference. And I, too, was invited there as a master class. And I did there already three different events: a round table, a master class, and a presentation on the “Quality” section. Therefore, as you understand, in two days it is difficult for me to create something completely unique. Therefore, much of what I will say already exists in the record and is available on the UsabilityLab website. Therefore, if you like it, and you want to show it to your colleagues, then you can give them a link to the corresponding resource.
And the value of what I am telling you is that you can discuss with me and ask your questions that were not asked by anyone before you, i.e. get a unique experience. Here, in my opinion, there are no people in the audience who were with me on Monday, but I saw them today at this conference. Because of the intensity of conferences, the audience is mixed, and someone could hear it before.
Two more prefixing words. One in the address of Fedor, but it will be the second.
Much of what I will try to show now is part of the training courses that I teach, so this is, in my opinion, very high-quality material.
And I wanted to say thanks to Fedor, because thanks to his initiative, first of all, a usability section will be held at this conference. There will be seven reports from representatives of various companies, including those mentioned by Fedor. It seems to me that it is his great merit, and some adventurism in raising such an eccentric theme, as he himself introduced it.
The presentation, which I have already delivered to the conference organizers, contains more than 70 slides. And it is available to you. Naturally, we will not have time to discuss everything in the allotted time. I plan to show you three parts:
- Why usability
- Usability Maturity
- Concepts and Processes
The sequence is chosen, perhaps, not the best. Perhaps it would be more natural to begin with definitions.
Why usability?
This part was planned by me as a provocation-aggressive Socratic conversation. You remember that Socrates communicating with his students, asked them stimulating questions. They sought answers to them, and so tracts were born that came to us. But I, of course, not Socrates, and you are not Plato. But I would like to provoke you to think.
I planned it mentally as a conversation with you, but there are many of you, and I am alone, so a full-fledged conversation cannot work for technical reasons.
As an epigraph here is a quote from Scott Berkun’s article “On the Strength of Usability Labs”:
- We need more savvy users!
- Not! We need more caring developers!
Much of what I am going to tell will be based on his articles, which we translated into Russian. They can also be found on the links.
Now, actually, a provocation: Are you in target?
You develop products. Are you sure that they have convenient interfaces? Of course, sure! Can we do something bad? We are all smart people. I say this without irony and sarcasm, I respect you all a priori, just as you respect me. We are all representatives of information technology, which require from us such knowledge that not many people have. We are a minority that often makes most unhappy, dictating their will to them.
Our users, despite the fact that many of us are brilliant, call our work sludge. I am a delicate person, and I try not to use shocking words. But here I saved it - these are the words of Berkun - why software sucks? So why what we develop, it turns out to be left behind? How do you know exactly what users are saying about your sites and the programs that you supply to them. And how do you decide for yourself whether what you create is convenient or not?
Why do users call our systems sludge? Well, because they seem too complicated to them. Because users do not understand how to work with them. Because programs are unstable, often break. Users say: “I'm sick! I'll go look for something simpler. " We force users to change their perception of the world, and cannot integrate our system into their life. We often offer a product and assume that the user should enjoy interacting with him. In fact, user enjoyment is beyond interaction with our product. The user wants to buy something in 5 minutes in our online store, or finish the work, write a letter, etc., and finally go to enjoy. Therefore, all we have to do is create invisible and effective interfaces that allow solving problems in a short time, pay us money for it, and can be parted forever, or can meet again if we have a competent loyalty program.
How does this work out? None of us does anything wrong. We do everything out of good intentions. I am sure that there are no professional villains among us. And we make every decision a blessing. But each of us is self-centered. What does self-centeredness mean? This is a psychological concept - when a person believes that people want the same thing as himself, what they think, just like himself, they feel the same thing as he, etc. It is more inherent in children, an adult gradually over his life overcomes this egocentrism, facing the manifestation of the fact that people are different from him, he learns to look at things with other people's eyes. But the egocentrism inherent in us from childhood remains to old age, not completely obsolete. And we often think about our users who they really are. And we consider our solutions convenient, standard or ingenious. But you need to engage the user! We need to bring him and ask what he thinks about it, and whether he can work with it. We make frequent assumptions that lead our projects astray. And our efforts turn into negative experiences of our users.
Stop guessing! Collect the data and decide whether what you are doing is good or not! If you do not conduct usability testing, but, looking ahead, I will say that usability testing is the execution of the tasks for which the product was created, by the end user in some observable environment. Usability testing can be done for $ 20, you can spend tens of thousands of dollars - it depends on the seriousness of the issues being addressed and the available means, but there are no restrictions - it is a myth that usability testing is expensive - the range is from $ 0 to infinity, if we make a nuclear power plant control interface, where the criticality of a human error is very high, it is not a sin to conduct a study lasting several months. Well, without conducting work with the user, you do not know exactly which direction you are going. Maybe not at all. And maybe you spend the effort on what the user does not need.
I, as well as you, work in many Internet projects, and I came to these ideas through some experience and in my history, in my personal history, there were moments of decision making without referring to any users. I have a lot of examples from the dating industry - the wonderful thing is the functionality of “wink”. Free, and does not imply any obligations. A man can wink at a woman - as it happens in the real world. This functionality is implemented on match.com’s industry leader. But the user comes to usability testing and asks - and how is that? And what follows - no, of course, I understand in the physical world, which means to wink, but only in your system, what will happen - I do not blink at all? Should I press a button? And as a result of this misunderstanding of this function, he either does not use it at all (that is, ignores it), or begins to abuse it, and then the support service begins to receive messages - “Do you have something there, tick with your eyes? That they all wink at me? ”Because the user, not knowing the value of this function, and where it leads, uses it incorrectly. This is just one example, when we thought of it for the user, and the user turned out to be completely unnecessary. It is necessary to conduct regular usability testing so that all our efforts are not in vain.
Prototyping is an excellent risk control tool for projects you develop. This is the second rule of usability - to develop a layout that can be checked with users before the start of serious development. There are no database structures yet - they are not defined, no lines of code are written. The prototype can be made on paper, can be made in HTML, but you have to do it a maximum in a week, or even two days - it all depends on the level of detail that follows and the tasks that the prototype faces. And immediately you get a lot of clarity - you don’t spend money before you decide whether to spend it in this direction at all or not. Combined with usability testing, prototyping allows us to save time and money.
How to improve the product and processes?
- Smart design teams eliminate errors before the product falls into the hands of the user, using prototypes.
- In combination with usability testing, prototypes do not allow the team to stray from the right course.
The second thing I often come across is the following position: “Good! You say very correct words, but we cannot tell our customer / management, who allocates money, to say - we need to spend more time and more money, i.e. Increase the project’s budget and deadlines in order to include you into the project - weirdo-weirdists. ” Fundamentally wrong understanding. Usability leads to a reduction in time and to a reduction in the resources required to complete the project. But in this case, however, there are curiosities. The outsourcing business is very developed in Russia and many good programmers are working on Western projects. Then the project managers tell me: “Well, actually, we are not very interested in the reduction either, because we have a crowd of programmers who need to be fed. And if the budget is suddenly reduced, then what will they do? ”In this case, we have a conflict, a strategic one, and the way out of it is to make a strategic decision - which is better: feed a team of programmers or have satisfied and loyal customers who in a short time delivered a quality product, a quality solution? I think that this is a peculiarity of Russia, but businessmen working here - in Russia, and following the budget, should certainly be interested in this to happen quickly and efficiently.
')
Why is all this necessary? Now about the money itself, I’ve talked a little bit about it. The numbers that you see on the screen: "1 dollar brings from 10 to 100 dollars of profit or savings." Each project has hidden expenses that are not planned in the budget. These are rework costs, user support costs, etc. When they determine the development budget and set deadlines, they often do not really understand that there may be two or three times more spending on this for the product to live in order to adapt it to the real world. Such figures are some of the usabilityists who, as Fedor said, are few, do not believe these figures - and this is amazing! Perhaps because they work as consultants and are not close to the business for which they work. These figures are taken from statistics, but I personally can subscribe to them, because I work for a company that, among other things, develops its projects. On Friday you will see on the reports of our section the performance of Anna Galahova from IT-Online, which will tell you how the sales plan is being fulfilled due to usability, with stagnant marketing. There we got "clean" conditions, because there were difficulties with marketing and there were successes in usability. In these clean conditions, it was very well possible to show what a huge resource is in improving the user experience and the quality of life of our user - and what he pays for it.
So, how does this happen? As I said, this is reducing development time and costs, increasing sales, increasing user loyalty (recalling one of usability metrics: productivity, efficiency, satisfaction), and reducing the hidden costs associated with reworking and endless user support.
Positive usability contribution:
- Development: Reduced costs and reduced time;
- Sales: Increased revenue;
- Users: Increase efficiency, productivity and satisfaction;
- Reducing the cost of implementation (by reducing training) and user support.
Since the report was originally focused on a development conference, for RIT, here is a slide, which describes in more detail the positive contribution of usability to development, but there could be another slide at this place - why it affects sales, and so on - I think it makes no sense here again to list everything. You probably already believe me.
Impact on development:
- Reduced development costs
- Reduced development time
- Reduced product support costs
- Reducing the cost of product rework
The conclusion of the first part. Most people - and this is a quote from Scott Burkun (a UI designer from Microsoft, who grew up from a usability project manager) “Most people don’t know how to give gifts even to themselves. We do not always know how to make ourselves happy, not that of others.
Everything good in this world is created by a generous mind. If you create for others, you give them what they are willing to pay for. ”
Literature:
Scott Berkun:
- The art of developing user interface prototypes
- Why most programs are so lame
- The power of usability lab
- Why great technology doesn't create equally great products.
http://scottberkun.it-online.ru/articles/
Aaron Marcus:
- The ROI of Usability
http://www.upassoc.org/usability_resources/
usability_in_the_real_world / roi_of_usability.html
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/17230/
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