“The implementation of HCI can be perceived as an art as well as a science…” (Issa & Isaias, 2015, p.22)
Rather than thinking about usability as a metric that can be hit or missed, it might be more productive to think about it as an ongoing, fluid, and necessary endeavour.
For me, the usability of something is:
- its ability to understand the user’s needs;
- its ability to meet those needs; AND
- how positive the overall experience is for the user
The best products manage to appease a whole demographic — sometimes broad, other times niche. Finding different ways to do this is art.
The science is how evidence can be collected and leveraged to generate best practices. While there isn’t one magic formula, there are certain factors like flexibility or ease-of-use which always deserve attention…
USABILITY IN EDUCATION
The landscape of education has much room for tech, but it’s also where tech has often been incorporated just for the sake of… incorporating it.
I work in EdTech which is why I believe in it, but I also recognize that it needs to be applied meaningfully — otherwise, I wouldn’t have a job…
Fundamentally, usability in education should be very concerned with ensuring that systems do not distract students from content or the learning process. They should be spending time writing papers, not trying to figure out how to upload them.
Now I’m not saying this just because I’m in the field, but I believe people play an important role here.
During my undergrad, we were forced to attend library workshops. They were incredibly boring, but now I appreciate how useful those lessons in manipulating search engines actually were.
Usability in education needs facilitators who are “on the ground” — librarians who want students to find better sources, instructional designers who strive to listen and address student frustrations.
It’s about making whatever tech is available work for you, and not the other way around.
USABILITY GONE WRONG
Woolgar’s (1990) participant observation was fun because it captured struggle.
In the “wrong socket” saga, tester Ruth was given a task and provided with documentation to accomplish it. Yet it turned out she was given the wrong thing to plug into the machine…
Ruth checked the manual first — something consumers have been “configured” to do. We aren’t encouraged to be curious about how our machines work, we’re conditioned to ask questions only when they don’t.
When Ruth found nothing helpful in the manual, she turned to the observers in the room. In the real-world unfortunately, accessing responsive — not to mention effective — support from companies is not always easy…
Staffers stepping in to assist Ruth was just one example of the instances where observers intervened in the study — acts Woolgar (1990) described as “thoroughly unnatural” (p.85).
I got the sense that the observers found it difficult to just stand by. Instead, they showed an urge to help and connect with the participants — maybe they took “know your user” too seriously?
My feeling is that these actions perpetuated the expert-novice relationship. Whereas Ruth and others were invited to provide insight into how people outside of the company would interact with the products, there wasn’t much room to do that when staff would just jump in and offer suggestions based on their implicit expectations.
Consider the instance when the observer offered one of the participants a coffee break (Woolgar, 1990, p.71). The participant asks whether this is a task in itself — even jokingly, we can see how the line between exploration and surveillance had become blurred.
ISSA & ISAIAS vs WOOLGAR
Issa and Isaias (2015) were broad and general — highlighting various usability guidelines to consider while promoting a user-centred approach.
Woolgar’s (1990) work helped illustrate the potential obstacles in attempting to do so…
He described how designers and engineers built the product, yet their colleagues in support or sales had little faith that they actually understood the user. There is irony here in how each team had their own conception of “the” user, based on their work — even if some of them were not even customer-facing!
In the same company, usability was hindered by division and bureaucracy.
Lack of collaboration represents a practical issue — so do resources (which Issas & Isaias touched on) as well as time. At some point, the product needs to ship.
Testing should never end anyways, which is why I argue that usability is more a continued process than a static benchmark.
REFERENCES
Issa T., Isaias P. (2015) Usability and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). In: Sustainable Design. Springer, London.
Woolgar, S. (1990). Configuring the user: the case of usability trials. The Sociological Review, 38 (1_suppl), 58-99.