IT703: Directed Readings

(Usability Engineering)

Lecture 1
Course Information

March 30, 2019 Prof. Abdelaziz Khamis 1

Lecture 1 Topics
 Course Objectives
 Assessment Tasks
 What is Usability?
 What is a User Interface?
 The Importance of Good Design
 The Benefits of Good Design
 What is Usability Engineering?
 Course Project (MIT Open Courseware)

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Course Objectives

 The objectives of the course are to enable

students to:
 Develop more usable interaction designs, including
Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and Web applications.
 Get experience with a usability engineering process.
 Evaluate/test usability of a user interface and report
usability evaluation/test results.
 Learn the necessary concepts, processes, and tools
that would enable them to pursue further research in
the field of Usability Engineering.
 Conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR).

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Assessment Tasks

 Class Participation: 10%

 Assignments: 10%
 Semester Project: 20%
 SLR Paper: 20%
 Final Exam: 40%

Total 100%

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What is Usability?

 Usability is only one attribute of a software system.

Software engineers have a lot to worry about:
 Functionality
 Performance
 Cost
 Security
 Usability
 Reliability
 Standards
 Many design decisions involve tradeoffs among different
attributes.

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What is Usability? (Continued)

 Usability is a qualitative attribute that assesses how easy

user interfaces are to use.
 Usability possess five quality components/dimensions:
 Effective – The completeness and accuracy with which
users achieve their goals.
 Efficient – The speed and accuracy with which users can
complete their tasks.
 Satisfaction – How pleasant is to use the design?
 Error tolerant – How well the design prevents errors and
helps with recovery from those that do occur.
 Easy to learn – How well the product supports both initial
orientation and an increase in the understanding of its
capabilities.

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What is a User Interface?

 The user interface is the part of a computer and its

software that people can see, hear, touch, talk to, or
otherwise understand or direct.
 The user interface has essentially two components: input
and output. Input is how a person communicates his or
her needs or desires to the computer. Output is how the
computer conveys the results of its computation and
requirements to the user.
 Proper interface design will provide a mix of well-designed
input and output mechanisms that satisfy the user’s
needs, capabilities, and limitations in the most effective
way possible.

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The Importance of Good Design

 With today’s technology and tools, and our motivation to

create usable interfaces, why do we continue to produce
systems that are unusable?
 We don’t know what really makes good design.
 A well-designed interfaces are terribly important to users:
 They are their window to view the capabilities of the system.
 They are the vehicles through which many tasks are presented.
These tasks often have a direct impact on an organization’s
relations with its customers, and its profitability.
 A screen’s layout and appearance and a system’s
navigation affect users in a variety of ways. If they are
confusing and inefficient, users will have greater difficulty
doing their jobs and will make more mistakes.
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The Benefits of Good Design

 Productivity benefits
 Experimental studies showed that users with well-designed
interfaces are more productive.
For example, Screen users were about 20% more productive with
the less crowded version.
 Economic benefits
 Training costs are lowered because training time is reduced.
 Support line costs are lowered because fewer assist calls are
necessary.
 Identifying and resolving problems during the design process has
significant economic benefits.
 User satisfaction is increased because aggravation and frustration
are reduced.
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What is Usability Engineering?

 Usability engineering is an iterative, user-centered

development process that ensures a high level of
usability.
 Iterative development process is the current best-practice
process for developing user interfaces.
 It’s a specialization of the spiral model described by Boehm
for general software engineering.
 User-centered development process is a widely-accepted
way to build user interfaces with good usability properties.
 Your course project is structured as a user-centered
development process.

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Course Project

 For the course project, you will work in small groups to

design, implement, and evaluate a user interface for an
interactive system of your choice.
 Your project should be a web, desktop, or mobile
interface. If you choose to do a mobile application, note
that it must at least be possible to simulate your project on
the web or the desktop, since one of your prototypes will
be such a simulation that you have to give to your
classmates to evaluate.
 Project Analysis: After you choose a project, you will start
your project by doing the following:
 User analysis: Identify the characteristics of your user
population, as we discussed in lecture.

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Course Project (Continued)

 User analysis: Identify the characteristics of your user

population, as we discussed in lecture.
 Task analysis: Determine the tasks of the problem
you've chosen, analyze their characteristics, and
answer the general questions about tasks we asked in
lecture. You should find and analyze at least 3 high-
level tasks. For example, in a recipe site, the most
central, interesting tasks might be editing a recipe,
finding a recipe and using a recipe(to actually cook).
Every task should have a goal and subtasks.
 Domain analysis: Determine the important entities and
relationships of your problem domain, and show them in a
diagram (object model or entity-relationship diagram).

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Course Project (Continued)

 Project Design: After analysis, you will start your design

by doing the following:
 Scenario: Write a scenario that involves all three of the tasks
you identified in task analysis. Where your task descriptions
in task analysis were abstract, your scenario should be
concrete.
 Storyboard Design: Storyboarding is a sequence of sketches
of the display screen during a scenario. The storyboard
should combine words with sketches showing how the
interface would look over the course of the scenario.
After the storyboard, you should have an analysis that
considers the design's good and bad points for Learnability,
visibility, efficiency, and error prevention.

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Course Project (Continued)

 Project Prototyping:
 You may want to use a prototyping tool for this step - such
as an HTML editor if you're building a web application, or a
GUI builder if you're writing a desktop application.
 After you finish your prototype, it will be distributed to at least
two of your classmates, who will do heuristic evaluations of it
and give their reports back to you.
 Project Implementation:
 You will do a working implementation of your course project.
 By the deadline, your implementation should be complete in
the sense that you are ready to test users on the tasks you
used for your paper prototype.
 You will demonstrate implementation in the lecture room.

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Course Project (Continued)

 User Testing: (Putting an interface in front of real users)

Conduct a formative evaluation with each user:
 Provide your briefing and (optionally) demo.

 Then provide the tasks one at a time, observe, and take

notes.

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