This document discusses World Usability Day and the importance of usability. It defines usability as having 6 key qualities: expectations, learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction. It discusses how even subtle poor usability can have serious impacts. Examples are given of both past technologies like glass and potential future technologies like Google Glass to illustrate the importance of usability. The document concludes with a group activity where participants invent ways to improve the usability of a product to create a more usable future.
2. Agenda
The curse of usability
Defining Usable
Poor Usability
Glass Past and Future
Group Activity
3. At work, I am paid to look for and fix
usability problems.
The curse is that I always find them,
even when I’m not looking.
4. 4
Usable - fit or ready for use or service
Usability is defined by 6 quality components:
Expectations: Meets the anticipated /needed use (Utility/Efficacy)
Learnability/Intuitive: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time
they encounter the design?
Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily
can they reestablish proficiency?
Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can
they recover from the errors?
Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?
6. 6
Answer
Who is this man and
what is his nickname?
Jakob Neilson
“King of Usability”
www.useit.com
7. 7
Where is Usability?
Interfaces– what kind?
Physical things – what things?
Concepts – which ones?
Any others??
8. 8
Poor Usability
“Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the
point: design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no
design at all.
Everyone makes design decisions all the time without realizing it ...good design is
simply the result of making these decisions consciously, at the right stage, and in
consultation with others as the need arise."
Douglas Martin
9. 9
Tools
“Tools used to be an
extension of the physical self,
now they are an extension of
the mental self.”
Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist,
examining the way humans and technology
interact and evolve together.
http://www.ted.com/talks/amber_case_we_are_
all_cyborgs_now.html
18. 18
ACTIVITY: Invent Usability
1. Group with 2-3 people with the same fighting style
2. Select something you are passionate about as a group:
Can openers, bookshelves, wheelchairs, phones, video games, etc.
3. On a sheet of paper, collectively list the low usability attributes
4. On a separate sheet of paper, brainstorm about how that thing may be
used in 2020. Your turn to invent a more usable future!
5. List the impact of making it more usable and how it will change our
culture, society or the world.
6. Share with the room
19. 19
A brave new world beyond 2020
Envision 2020 – 2030
http://www.youtube.com/v/1Lmd3l0W5JI?version=3&hl=en_US
20. 20
Quotes
All things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease,
when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts,
and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else. (Plato)
Usability testing is the killing field of cherished notions. - David Orr
We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we
created them. - Albert Einstein
The joy of an early release lasts but a short time. The bitterness of an unusable
system lasts for years.
According to Jakob Neilsen, usability is defined by 6 quality components.
1. Jakob Neilson – King of Usability
1. Jakob Neilson – King of Usability
When usability impacts our health and well being, you can truly appreciate the seriousness and importance of it when it impacts our lives.
The oldest examples of glass discovered in the tombs of Egypt and Assyria are in the form of beads, scarabs, amulets, etc. for personal decoration, while glass objects such as bottles, cups and vases came at a later date.
In Egypt, the first glass we know of, as a component of faience ware, dates from as far back as the Neolithic Badarian culture at the turn of the 5th and 4th millennia BC. Glass is produced from a mixture of silica-sand, lime and soda, colored with the copper ore malachite and fused at a high temperature.