Chapter 11: Just-In-Time Usability Engineering

Overview

John Rieman

With its leadership position in the market, Nokia has the luxury to influence many of the standards, real and de facto, that define today's wireless user experience. This position has been attained with the aid of skillful designers, innovative contextual design methods, close ties with leading researchers, and a fortunate location in a country that is unusually receptive to new technology and lifestyles.

But this influence has limits. Key interactive technologies are surfacing worldwide, many of them outside Nokia's sphere of influence, and some of them even outside the company's knowledge. Some are user-neutral and many are user-hostile, and as usability engineers, our natural response is to decry the lack of user participation in their definition. 'Why weren't we asked?' We shake our heads. 'Why didn't they consider users' real needs?' 'Who let the bloody technologists define this monstrosity?'

If you are in the business, you know the examples: WAP and its associated bundle of acronymic standards (WIM, GPRS, WMI, etc.). Of course m-commerce will simplify our future lives, but why is it so incredibly hard to get it running today? The service providers blame the handsets, the handset designers blame the service providers, and the user is in the middle. If we had to buy groceries this way, we'd all starve before we got the accounts set up.

First, consider SyncML. The need to synchronize data across several devices is obvious, and Nokia is a key member of the group defining this critical standard. It works, but these are the early days, and the underlying technology still has something of a 'camel is a horse by committee' flavor. So many options, so much flexibility-how do we incorporate that into an elegant solution for the average user, who just wants her one-and-only PC phonebook to show up on her one-and-only phone?

And third-generation cellular systems with 'rich-call' technology-it's hard enough to drive a car while talking, but now we can simultaneously set up a conference call, check our flight time using the browser, and monitor our position on GPS. Never mind the user interface; we'll need three people just to think about all those things at once.

But while the nay-sayers and Luddites shake their heads and mutter, these technologies are opportunities ripe for the taking. Many of today's 'unusable' applications will define tomorrow's market and user experience. This is no small issue. In the short history of the digital world, the examples of 'ugly duckling' technologies that transformed into swans are legion.

Consider email-in its earliest incarnations, it was just a way to pass a note from the late-night computer operator to the early-morning computer operator: 'Tape drive 3 dead-joe.' A mail message couldn't move beyond a single, one-user machine. That was in the days when programmers wrote code on paper pads and handed it to keypunch operators, when you carefully penned a diagonal stripe across the top of your card deck in case you dropped it, and the man (person) in the street thought of computers as walls of flashing lights on 'Twilight Zone' episodes.

Contextual design of email for the office environment? Hardly. But it wasn't needed, because email grew like a living thing, as affordable machines, timesharing, local-area networks, and ultimately the Internet provided new opportunities to be exploited by late-night technologists.

Or think of spreadsheets. Did the initial requirements include what-if planning? Database facilities? Interactive three-dimensional graphs? The original designers could hardly have dreamed of such power.

And the Internet infrastructure-nuclear strike-hardened, designed by computer scientists to exchange software and raw data, a technological tour de force. But e-commerce? Free HotMail? Buffy fan fiction? Not on our tax dollars!

There were microprocessors, global-positioning systems, code-division multiple-access (CDMA) cellular technology (you couldn't have done the encoding computations in real time on a 1950s mainframe), and a hundred other examples. Sure, there were futurists, science-fiction writers, and other visionaries who imagined how it might all turn out. But even they were usually wrong. As recently as the early 1970s, Kubrik and Clarke's Space Odyssey seemed so plausible.

Of course, as each of these technologies coalesced, our formal design techniques were able to encompass and reform them. But in their dawning days, it was the late-night technologists who made things happen, for their own strange reasons, in their own strange ways. They are still with us, pushing the envelope of the wireless world just as they pushed the envelope of computing. Their innovations are the new bricks and mortar with which we will build the wireless information society. We may shudder or marvel at the complexity and idiosyncrasies, but to support our users and the company's business, we must work within these technologies even as we try to change them.

Just-in-time usability engineering lets us do exactly that.