The Usability Professionals Association nominated the 3rd of November 2005 as World Usability Day and people all round the world celebrated the progress that has been made in making products and services truly usable by their intended users. Usable should, of course, mean that products have been designed with the users needs and capabilities central to the design and then tested out before being released.
As part of our promotion of World Usability Day in the UK, we generated some publicity by highlighting bad usability in a number of areas and apparently questioning whether the world was ready for such a day. We argued that although some progress has been made – the success of the iconic I-pod is largely down to the usability of the device, especially the click wheel interface and I-tunes – we still have to put up with too much hassle on a daily basis to be celebrating success of any kind.
As a result of this rant against bad design, we managed to generate some TV and radio coverage for usability in the UK. This is sorely needed. A recent study of marketing directors by e-consultancy found that most of them had no idea about usability or its importance in ensuring that their websites actually delivered business benefit.
One of my complaints about the World Usability Day event in the UK was that it had the tag line ‘making IT easy’. I have no objection to making life easier but I believe (and I am supported in this view by the international standard ISO 9241 Part 11) that a usable product or service has two other key features in addition to being easy or pleasant to use.
This approach to usability involves focusing on what users are trying to do with the product and making sure it delivers results without requiring us to be rocket scientists or contortionists. It does not need to be easy – it depends on what we are doing. We are generally prepared to invest far more effort into using the web when planning a complex journey across the country than we are to check our bank balance.
One point which the public picked up (and which they responded to by email and text message with examples of their own) was that we should stop accepting poor usability and demand that the people who design and supply products and services adopt a far more user centred approach to their design. I am hoping that we will be able to build on this public interest in the UK and greatly raise the profile of usability in practice.
One issue which was widely discussed on the day, concerns making computing accessible to as broad a range of users as possible. I am therefore pleased that the first two papers in this issue of Behaviour and Information Technology, look at computer accessibility.
Making computers accessible
Stephanie Hackett and Bambang Parmanto from the University of Pittsburgh and Xiaming Zeng from the University of East Carolina in the United States have carried out a retrospective study of website accessibility over the period from 1997 to 2002. They compared the accessibility and complexity of government websites and compared these with a random sample of other websites. They found that the US government websites remained accessible even with increasing complexity, whereas the other websites tended to become increasingly inaccessible as complexity increased. The authors conclude that, as the government websites show, it is possible to follow Section 508 and keep websites accessible despite increasing complexity of content.
Julie Jacko and her colleagues from the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology have also looked at accessibility features, in their case comparing Microsoft Windows accessibility settings with enhanced feedback. They presented a number of users with visual impairments (resulting from diabetic retinopathy - a common side effect of diabetes) with a series of computer based menu selection tasks. They compared using Windows accessibility features with providing enhanced multimodal feedback (which they expected would help). In fact, the enhanced feedback made little difference whereas the Windows accessibility settings had a significant positive impact on performance. The authors still believe that enhanced feedback has a role and they discuss their findings in relation to the potential benefits and drawbacks of using the Windows accessibility features.
Social issues in usability
The development of collaborative learning social networks in a distributed learning community was the focus of a detailed study by Cho from the National University of Singapore, Lee from Nanyang Technology University and Stefanone and Gay from Cornell University. They adopted a social network perspective to help them understand how 31 distributed learners evolved into a collaborative network. One of their findings was that existing friendship networks could have a significant effect depending on how long the community had been in existence. This is an important area for future research and the authors identify a number of limitations of their investigation which they plan to overcome in future studies.
One of the most common uses of mobile phones involves arranging a rendezvous, i.e. the informal co-ordination of a face to face meeting between friends and family. Martin Colbert from the School of Computing and Information Systems at Kingston University in the UK conducted a field evaluation of mobile phone use before and during a rendezvous. The paper contains a number of intriguing findings but the key point is that the social context of the rendezvous seemed to make users far less tolerant of poor design or usage features than they were before the rendezvous. The author draws a number of conclusions which have design implications for those developing so called 3G phones and services.
Short paper
Salmerón from the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Granada and Cañas from Inmaculada Fajardo in Spain present a short paper on a study they conducted to test out the effect of expertise on hypertext information retrieval tasks. They considered a constraint attunement hypothesis (CAH) in order to predict the effects of expertise on the information retrieval task. They found that expertise helped when the system interface was organised semantically but not when it was random. They point out that poorly designed interfaces can disadvantage expert users more than novices to the extent that their performance is no better.
Finally, as is normal in the last issue in the volume, I would like to acknowledge the help of all those involved in the journal. I would particularly like to thank our world-wide editorial team, Ahmet Cakir - General Editor, Matthias Rauterberg - European Editor, John Karat - North American Editor and reviews editor Laura Leventhal. I would also like to thank all the Editorial Board, the network of referees and the authors who enthusiastically submit their manuscripts, and, of course, the readers and subscribers.
Behind the scenes, I continue to receive greatly appreciated assistance from Richard Steele and Ben Griffin at Taylor and Francis. I would also like to thank my wife Fiona who continues to support me in many areas of my work. Thanks to you all.