Lecture 1:

Usability of Interactive
Systems
(Chapter 1)

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Objectives
❑ To understand what is meant by software usability and its
importance.

❑ To understand usability requirements.

❑ To understand usability criteria (measures).

❑ To provide a brief overview of usability engineering process.

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What is usability?
❑ It addresses the relationship between tools and their users.

❑ Allowing intended users to accomplish their tasks in the best way

possible.

❑ How well users can use the system’s functionality?

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Why is usability important?
❑ From the user's perspective
➢ Usability can make the difference between performing a task accurately
and completely or not, and enjoying the process or being frustrated.

❑ From the developer's perspective

➢ Usability is important because it can mean the difference between the
success or failure of a system.

❑ From a management point of view

➢ Software with poor usability can reduce the productivity of the workforce
to a level of performance worse than without the system.

❑ In all cases, lack of usability can cost time and effort, and can
greatly determine the success or failure of a system.

❑ Given a choice, people will tend to buy systems that are more user-
friendly.
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Usability requirements
❑ Some synonyms for “user-friendly”
➢ easy to use; accessible; comprehensible; intelligible; and available.

❑ But a “friend” also seeks to help and be valuable.

➢ A friend is not only understandable, but understands.
➢ A friend is reliable and doesn’t hurt.
➢ A friend is pleasant to be with.

❑ These measures are still subjective and vague, so a systematic

process is necessary to develop usable systems for specific users in
a specific context.

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What makes a website or piece of
software usable?
❑ Usability is the quality of a system that makes it …

➢ easy to learn;

➢ easy to use;

➢ easy to remember;

➢ error tolerant; and

➢ subjectively pleasing.

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Dimensions of usability
❑ Learnability: is it easy to learn?

❑ Efficiency: once learned, is it fast to use?

❑ Memorability: is it easy to remember what you learned?

❑ Errors: are errors few and recoverable?

❑ Satisfaction: is it enjoyable to use?

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Usability dimensions vary in importance

❑ Depends on the user

➢ Novice users need learnability
➢ Infrequent users need memorability
➢ Experts need efficiency

❑ But no user is uniformly novice or expert

➢ Domain experience
➢ Application experience
➢ Feature experience

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Usability criteria (measures)
❑ Time to learn

❑ Speed of performance

❑ Retention over time

❑ Rate of errors by users

❑ Subjective satisfaction

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Time to learn
❑ How long does it take for typical members of the community to learn
relevant task?

❑ Learning happens in chunks.

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Speed of performance
❑ How long does it take to perform relevant benchmark tasks?

❑ Usually there is a tradeoff between speed of performance vs. time to

learn.
➢ Often faster to use systems are harder to learn.
➢ e.g. Unix vs. Windows

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Retention over time
❑ Frequency of use and ease of learning help make for better user
retention.

❑ Related with time to learn.

➢ Retention is more important if learning is costly.

❑ UIs are easier to learn and remember if operations match user

intuitions.
➢ e.g., using a cooking stove vs. controlling a backhoe.

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Rate of errors by users
❑ How many and what kinds of errors are made during benchmark
tasks?

❑ Its importance depends on the application.

➢ e.g. browsing music vs. safety critical systems.

❑ Tradeoff with freedom of interactions.

❑ Tradeoff with design & development costs.

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Subjective satisfaction
❑ How much did users like using various aspects of the interface?

❑ May be hard to separate UI from functionality issues.

❑ Allow for user feedback via interviews, free-form comments and

satisfaction scales.

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Usability criteria (cont’d)
❑ Trade-offs in design options frequently occur.
➢ Changes to the interface in a new version may create consistency
problems with the previous version, but the changes may improve the
interface in other ways or introduce new needed functionality.

❑ Design alternatives can be evaluated by designers and users via

mockups or high-fidelity prototypes.
➢ The basic tradeoff is getting feedback early and perhaps less
expensively in the development process versus having a more authentic
interface evaluated.

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How do you achieve a high level of
usability?
❑ The key principle for maximizing usability is to employ iterative
design, which progressively refines the design through evaluation
from the early stages of design.

❑ The evaluation steps enable the designers and developers to

incorporate user and client feedback until the system reaches an
acceptable level of usability.

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Usability engineering is a process

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Design
❑ User and task analysis
➢ knowing who your users are and understanding their needs.

❑ Design guidelines
➢ Consistency, shortcuts, preventing errors, etc.
➢ e.g. the user should always know what’s happening, but don’t forget to
keep the user mental workload within acceptable limits.

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Implement
❑ Prototyping
➢ Cheap, throw-away implementations
➢ Low-fidelity vs. high-fidelity

❑ GUI implementation techniques

➢ Input/output models
➢ Toolkits
➢ UI builders

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Evaluate
❑ Evaluation puts prototypes to the test

❑ Expert evaluation
➢ Heuristics and walkthroughs

❑ Predictive evaluation
➢ Testing against an engineering model (simulated user)

❑ Empirical evaluation (user observations)

➢ Watching users do it

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