The Problem with Traditional Usability Engineering

The traditional American approach to usability engineering was first defined by John Gould and Clayton Lewis at IBM almost 20 years ago: Investigate users and their tasks. Design and prototype. Evaluate and measure. And always: iterate the design and test again.^[7]

A generation of researchers have suggested refinements and minor shifts in focus. At Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, John Carroll prescribed scenarios;^[8] at Bellcore, Thomas Landauer championed metrics and focused iteration;^[9] Clayton Lewis and John Rieman at the University of Colorado emphasized tasks;^[10] and Jakob Nielsen (Danish in heritage, but taking an American approach at Bellcore and Sun) compromised with discount testing while retaining the overall direction.^[11]

There is also a European version of the tradition, more humanistic, less clinical. The user is regarded not as an object to examine but as a participant in the design process, a partner in the contextual inquiry, a collaborator in engineering a system to be satisfying as well as effective.^[12] But it is only a shift in emphasis. Users in American labs are human as well, and Americans have added significant value to the 'European' approach.^[13]

Whether American or European, both traditions work best in a world that is increasingly rare, a world where one can, as the king advised Alice, 'Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end; then stop.' The signature publications of these traditions reflect this viewpoint, describing showpiece or exceptional situations where end users are surprisingly available and schedules are surprisingly tolerant. IBM's voice messaging at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles is an example,^[14] as is Nynex's ambitious project to redesign long-distance operator workstations,^[15] and the Utopia project in Scandinavia, creating early tools for computer-aided layout and typography.^[16]

Whenever they can be applied, these careful, long-term, task- and user-centered approaches will continue to have value within Nokia and the telecommunications industry. Many of the chapters in this book describe ongoing work in exactly that vein. But in the world of consumer products, we increasingly find ourselves pushing the envelope of user behavior, providing support for future tasks that today's users haven't even imagined. In such areas, the usability engineering must run concurrently with the underlying technology-and often behind it. The work can happen just in time at best, although calling it 'just in time' risks the criticism sometimes levied at Java just-in-time compilers-the work may happen just after it would be most useful.

This is the world today, and like Japanese industry in 1950, we must compete in the world as we find it.

^[7]J. Gould and C. Lewis, 'Designing for Usability: Key Principles and What Designers Think,' Commun. ACM 28(3): 300-311 (1985).

^[8]J. M. Carroll, ed., Scenario-Based Design: Envisioning Work and Technology in System Development. New York: Wiley, 1995.

^[9]T. K. Landauer, The Trouble with Computers. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995.

^[10]C. Lewis and J. Rieman, Task-Centered User Interface Design: A Practical Introduction. Shareware book available at ftp.cs.colorado.edu/pub/cs/distribs/clewis/HCIDesign .

^[11]J. Nielsen, 'Guerrilla HCI: Using Discount Usability Engineering to Penetrate the Intimidation Barrier,' in Cost-Justifying Usability, R. G. Bias and D. J. Mayhew, eds. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1994, pp. 245-272.

^[12]D. Schuler and A. Namioka, eds., Participatory Design. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993.

^[13]H. Beyer and K. Holtzblatt, Contextual Design. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann,

^[14]J. D. Gould, S. J. Boies, S. Levy, J. T. Richards, and J. Schoonard, 'The 1984 Olympic Message System: A Test of Behavioral Principles of System Design,' Commun. ACM 30(9): 758-769 (1987).

^[15]W. D. Gray, B. E. John, and M. E. Atwood, 'Project Ernestine: Validating GOMS for Predicting and Explaining Real-World Task Performance,' Human Comput. Interaction 8(3): 237-309 (1993).

^[16]S. Bødker, P. Ehn, J. Kammersgaard, M. Kyng, and Y. Sundblad, 'A Utopian Experience,' in Computers and Democracy-a Scandinavian Challenge, G. Bjerknes, P. Ehn, and M. Kyng, eds., Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 1987, pp. 251-278.