Difficulties in design Developing a computer system is hard work.

The path is littered with obstacles and traps, many of them human in nature. Gould (1988)1 has made these general observations about design: Nobody ever gets it right the first time. Development is chock-full of surprises. Good design requires living in a sea of changes. Making contracts to ignore change will never eliminate the need for change. Even if you have made the best system humanly possible, people will still make mistakes when using it. Designers need good tools. You must have behavioral design goals like performance design goals.

The first five conditions listed will occur naturally because people are people, both as users and as developers. These kinds of behavior must be understood and accepted in design. User mistakes, while they will always occur, can be reduced. Guidelines in the various design steps address this problem. Pitfalls in the design process exist because of a faulty design process, including a failure to address critical design issues, an improper focus of attention, or development team organization failures. Common faults are: No early analysis and understanding of the users needs and expectations. A focus on using design features or components that are neat or glitzy. Little or no creation of design element prototypes. No usability testing. No common design team vision of user interface design goals. Poor communication between members of the development team.

Designing for users: Five guidelines

How to design usable systems (Gould J.D.) 1988

The complexity of a graphical or Web interface will always amplify any problems that do occur. While obstacles to design will always exist, faults can be eliminated if the following design guidelines remain leading in the designers mind. Gain a complete understanding of users and their tasks. The users are the customers. Today, people expect a level of design sophistication from all interfaces, including Web sites. The product, system or Web site must be geared to peoples needs, not those of the developers. A wide gap in technical abilities, goals, and attitudes often exists between users and developers. A failure to understand the differences will doom a product or system to failure. Solicit early and ongoing user involvement. Involving the users in design from the beginning provides a direct conduit to the knowledge they possess about jobs, tasks, and needs. Involvement also allows the developer to confront a persons resistance to change, a common human trait. People dislike change for a variety of reasons, among them fear of the unknown and lack of identification with the system. Involvement in design removes the unknown and gives the user a stake in the system or identification with it. One caution, however: user involvement should be based on job or task knowledge, not status or position. The boss seldom knows what is really happening out in the office. Perform rapid prototyping and testing. Prototyping and testing the product will quickly identify problems and allow you to develop solutions. The design process is complex and human behavior is still not well understood. While the design guidelines that follow go a long way toward achieving ease of use, all problems cannot possibly be predicted. Prototyping and testing must be continually performed during all stages of development to uncover all potential defects. If thorough testing is not performed before product release, the testing will occur in the users office. Encountering a series of problems early in system use will create a negative first impression in the

customers mind, and this may harden quickly, creating attitudes that may be difficult to change. It is also much harder and more costly to fix a product after its release. In many instances, people may adapt to, or become dependent upon, a design, even if it is inefficient. This also makes future modifications much more difficult. Modify and iterate the design as much as necessary. While design will proceed through a series of stages, problems detected in one stage may force the developer to revisit a previous stage. This is normal and should be expected. Establish user performance and acceptance criteria and continue testing and modifying until all design goals are met. Integrate the design of all the system components. The software, the documentation, the help function, and training needs are all important elements of a graphical system or Web site and all should be developed concurrently. A system is being constructed, not simply software. Concurrent development of all pieces will point out possible problems earlier in the design process, allowing them to be more effectively addressed. Time will also exist for design trade-offs to be thought out more carefully. Usability Bennett2 (1979) was the first to use the term usability to describe the effectiveness of human performance. In the following years a more formal definition was proposed by Shackel 3(1981) and modified by Bennett 4(1984). Finally, Shackel 5(1991) simply defined usability as the capability to be used by humans easily and effectively, where: Easily = to a specified level of subjective assessment Effectively = to a specified level of human performance Usability Valuation in the Design Process Usability assessment should begin in the early stages of the product development cycle and should be continually applied throughout the process. The assessment should include the users entire experience, and all the products important components.
The commercial impact of usability in interactive systems (Bennett, J.L.) 1979 The concept of usability (Shackel, B.) 1981 4 Managing to meet usability requirements (Bennet, J.L.) 1984 5 Usabilitycontext, framework, definition, design and evaluation (Shackel, B.) 1991
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