Usability Engineering

Usability is all about how users interact with technology, and usability engineering studies
the human-computer interface (HCI) in depth. Usability engineering requires a firm
knowledge of computer science and psychology and approaches product development based
on customer feedback.

Usability engineers explicitly set down criteria for their designs and then describe
measurement schemes by which those criteria can be judged.

An example: Advanced mobile phones pose interesting HCI challenges. Mobile phone
manufacturers want to cram as much functionality into their products as possible, but the
physical size of the phones and their displays means that normal features for accessing lots
of functionality: menus, dialogue boxes, etc., tend to be inappropriate. Assume you have to
design a way of accessing phone functionality and you have decided on a restricted menu
system. Menus must not be long, perhaps a maximum of six items per menu. To
compensate for this you may decide to nest menus, but if you do this then it is easy for the
user to forget whereabouts in the menu hierarchy they are, so feedback must given.

As a usability engineer you set yourself the explicit goal of avoiding ‘menu lostness’; the
extent to which the user gets irredeemably lost in a menu hierarchy. On each menu there is
the ability to ‘bail out’ and return to the highest level menu. If a user bails out like this
without invoking some functionality then we assume that they have failed to find what they
are looking for and become lost.

The usability specification for this aspect of the menu system may look like the following:

Attribute Menu lostness

Measuring concept success in finding and invoking the desired functionality
Measuring method The ratio of successfully found functionality to bail outs
Now level This is a new product: there is no recorded now level
Worst case 50% of menu use results in bail outs
Planned level 10% of menu use results in bail outs
Best case No bail outs
The attribute ‘menu lostness’ describes what is wanted of the system in usability terms.
(Note though that ‘menu lostness’ is a bit of an opaque term. There should be
accompanying documentation described exactly what it means.) The measuring concept
describes what we are looking for in a system in order to judge whether the attribute is
fulfilled or not, and the measuring method describes how we should go about looking for it.
The now level describes the current state of the system; how the current system fares
against the measurements. The worst case, planned level and best case describe what the
designer should aim for in their design.

Problems with usability engineering

The problem with this sort of usability specification is that it may miss the point. What really
is at issue with the mobile phone example may be not that the user cannot get at all the
functionality easily, but whether the functionality that has been crammed it is really useful in
the first place. Usability engineering must start from the very beginning of the design
process to ensure that account is taken of these issues.
Also, it is not clear that what is specified in the usability specification actually relates to
genuine usability. In the example given we decided bailing out was a measure of failure.
What if the user is not aware of the possibility that they can bail out? Novice users may
struggle on, getting more and more lost and frustrated, unaware that they can just bail out.