Some Things Information Scientists Know That Web Site Developers Don’t

1. Some Things Information ScientistsKnowThat Web Site Developers Don’t Randolph G. Bias INF 180J Introduction to Information Studies UT-Austin School of Information Fall, 2003

2. Professional History • B.S. in psych from FSU • Ph.D. in cognitive psych from UT-Austin • Bell Labs for 3 years • IBM-Austin for 11 years • BMC Software for 5 years • Co-founded Austin Usability 3 years ago • Associate professor in the iSchool since January. • Previous teaching experience at UT, Rutgers, Huston-Tillotson, (SW)TSU

3. Objectives • To show how smart information scientists are, and • To show how dumb Web designers and developers are. No, rather: • To illustrate our mutual dependence. • And, to introduce you to a subset of Information Science.

4. Information Science and Technology • Human Information Processing • Sensation and perception • Cognition • Human learning and memory • Psycholinguistics • Decision making • HCI Design • Information Architecture • Digital media design • Usability engineering

5. Definitions • Usability -- the quality of a system, program, Web site, or device that enables it to be easily understood and conveniently used. Usability affords the user easy access to the product’s functions. • ISO 9241 definition: The effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which specified users achieve specified goals in particular environments. • HCI -- the point of contact between the user and the computer, including all physical and informational content.

6. Two Jokes . . . designed to simultaneously Establish the domain for our talk and 2. Insult everyone in the room.

7. The Discipline • Human Factors • Ergonomics • Man (sic) - Machine Interface • Human-Computer Interaction • Human Performance Engineering • Cognitive Engineering • Software Psychology • Usability Engineering

8. Usability is NOT Just common sense all art (and no science) stumbled onto by accident tacked on at the end free Usability IS intuitive, safe, error-free, enjoyable best designed in from the beginning best achieved by knowing your users “The best predictor of customer satisfaction” “The next competitive frontier” What is Usability ?

9. Engineering, not art • Usability professionals aren’t “keepers of the magic key.” • We purvey usability engineering methods -- specific, learnable techniques that yield valuable data. • Bad idea: “Mr. or Ms. Software Developer, don’t depend on your own intuitions. Depend on MINE!!”

10. an (old) photocopier - which button do you press to start making copies? not this one either nice knife… which side do you cut with? not this one! that’s the “clear all settings” button! this is the “start” button Poor Usability • It’s everywhere • In the everyday world: did you think it meant “copy”?

11. A better design

12. say you want to cancel your subscription…what would you do? this box pops up when you click “No” click here, right? Poor Usability • The Internet:

13. Poor usability is rampant • “66.8% of online shoppers have abandoned sites because they were unable to locate a product; 59% have left because the sites were disorganized or confusing.” • In a study of online merchandise purchases, “almost half of all attempts to make a purchase failed because the users could not work out how to complete the transaction.” • A recent, non-computer, work-flow example: If you were an 18-year-old considering where to go to college, and you were visiting the UT campus, where might you go for an application?

14. Why does this happen? • Typical software development process: • product conception (MRD) • design: product mgmt and engineering negotiate features • coding; maybe a visual designer makes a pass • QA / test • deployment • customers & users start complaining, support phones ring • big customers submit modification requests team gets to work addressing issues for R1.1 • Why wasn’t the user represented earlier in the process?

15. Why no usability engineering? • Website built to satisfy management, not users • “Branding” becomes the focus, site is treated as an advertisement, visual design overrides usability • It takes an act of corporate bravery to put up a relatively austere, simple site • Engineering owns too much responsibility for UI design • Thus, the UI reflects implementation technologies, developers’ design model • Teams can’t escape featuritis: • “Competitor A has these 5 features, competitor B has those 10… we’d better put them all in our next release.”

16. Design • Design entails discovery. • Design should be empirical. • Design is a process.

17. Analytical Armchair design Empirical -- Dreyfus (1953) “Designing for people” “Design is an intimate collaboration between engineers, designers, clients.” User focus throughout. Studied cabins for ocean liners. 8 “staterooms” in a warehouse. “Travelers” packed and unpacked for trips of 1 week to 3 months. Prototyping, iteration, collaborative design. 2 Design Approaches

18. Black Magic • NZ stomped the US in the 1995 America’s Cup. • Headed by Peter Blake and designer Doug Peterson. • SI, 5/22/95: “One of Blake’s earliest and best decisions was to build 2 nearly identical boats. It enabled NZ to test rigging configurations, keels, sails, and rudders and learn exactly how much faster or slower each change made the boats go.”

19. Black Magic (cont’d.) • Blake: “We learned nothing about boat speed from the trials . . . and everything from the two-boat program.” • “Blake told Peterson he wanted the sailors to be involved in the design process from the start.” • Peterson: “Everyone participated in decisions from the start. As opposed to the usual way of having a design team over here, and the sailing team over there, and directors telling you what you have to do.”

20. Be Empirical! From Carroll and Rosson: “Our view is that design activity is essentially empirical . . . not because we ‘don’t know enough yet,’ but because we can never know enough.”

21. And so . . . Empirical Design: Carroll and Rosson quote: “. . . not because we ‘don’t know enough yet,’ but because we can never know enough.” Participatory Design: Like the Kiwis. User-centered Design: Like Dreyfus.

22. So . . . • If we’re worried about USE, then it will behoove us to know something about WHO is doing the using. • Psychologists (cognitive psychologists, perceptual psychologists, etc.) and information scientists are the folks who study human information processing. • So . . . six things WE know that Web developers (apparently) don’t.

23. 1. Users have tasks to do. • The VAST majority of Web site visitors do not care at ALL about: • HTML, SMTP, IP addresses, C++, java, connection types, database design, • Doug Engelbart or Vinton Cerf, • How hard it was for you to develop a Web site, or • WHY it’s taking your page so long to load. • They just have a task to do, and if they could do it without a computer, that might be just fine.

24. 2. Perception is not a one-to-one mapping of sensations • Put another way, two people can process the same stimulus and have two different perceptions. • (Or one person, processing a stimulus at two different times.)

26. Same with auditory perception • Phonological ambiguity: • “An ice man” – “A nice man” • Lexical ambiguity • “His face was flushed but his broad shoulders saved him.” • Syntactic ambiguity • “They were shooting hunters.” • Semantic ambiguity • “There will be a short teachers meeting at 3:00 p.m.”

27. 3. What’s that, over there? • Human beings are very good at detecting movement, especially in the periphery. • Audio, too. http://www.liptonfavorites.com/

28. Some of your users/visitors may be: Non-native English speakers Left handed Capricorns Republicans Heterosexuals Poor visual processors In a hurry Alabamans In a public library Blind Mostly blind Color blind Geniuses Drunk Visitors to your earlier site First-time Web visitors! On a subway Using a PDA 4. People Differ

29. 5. Cognitive Set • Context influences perception. • A series of events can “set” a person to perceive things a certain way.

30. Guess what frequent error was made on this form, on an IBM Service site: • Name: ___________________ • Street Address: ___________________ • City: ___________________ • State/ZIP: ___________________ • County: ___________________

31. 6. Dangers of convenient sampling • Steven Krug, in his popular book Don't make me think, argues that though there are some exceptions, "it doesn't much matter who you test." • Jakob Nielsen famously champions employing only five users in a test (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html). • Such parsimony is attractive to the Web site development team always laboring under budget and schedule constraints. • But what happens when the usability engineering approach is too "discount"? ESPECIALLY when we test “friends, in the office”?

32. Bonus • Three things software developers know that HCI researchers don’t (or else tend to forget): • Performance in the first 2 hours with a system may or may not correlate with asymptotic performance. • Performance while being observed may not predict performance when alone. • If “usability” was ever mentioned in a software developer’s performance plan, I didn’t hear about it. • They get promotions and raises based on functionality, code quality, and schedule.

33. Principles of User-Centered Design The ABCs of developing useful and usable user interfaces are: • Products driven by task analysis • Designs based on perceptual/cognitive theory • Frequent and intentional UI evaluation and user feedback