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Chandan Gokhale and Jack Isreal presented their approach to Usability Engineering at IPS-Sendero during the January 27, 2005 CHI-Atlanta meeting. They have made Usability Engineering (UE) an integral part of application design, development, and rollout.
Jack kicked off the presentation with some background information regarding IPS-Sendero (the leader in balance sheet management, profitability and performance measurement, and financial accounting software) and their parent company, Fiserv. He also explained how UE originated as a discipline in their office, where senior members of the team recognized the need for HCI design skills.
Chandan described the phases of IPS-Sendero's UE lifecycle and some of the unique ways they have found to leverage the process.
- Discover phase: The UE group has formed user panels that they tap into on a regular basis for needs analysis and usability evaluations. This is a captive audience of IPS-Sendero product users who have shown an interest in cooperating with the UE team. They know that they are going to have to use the products and have a vested interest in providing input into their designs.
- Define phase: The UE group specifies UI and performance requirements (standards), some of which apply across all products and some of which are product specific.
- Design phase: The UE group creates a high-fidelity UI prototype for each new product that mimics all interactions that will take place. These prototypes are of such a high caliber that the development team uses the form, menu, and graphics files to begin UI implementation. In addition the UE group provides "targeted UI specs" that do not describe obvious UI properties interactions, just those that might be ambiguous to the developers.
- Evaluate phase: The UE group performs usability testing at IPS-Sendero's office, at customer sites, and remotely, depending on the need. They conduct surveys to track how actual users are using the software. In addition, they can analyze the company's customer-service database to identify usability issues.
Jack described the iterative nature of UI design and development within the organization by describing the interactions between UE and the Business Analyst (BA), Development (DEV), End-User Documentation (DOC), and Quality assurance (QA) teams. For each use case for a product:
- BA drafts functional requirements.
- UE critiques the requirements.
- BA revises the requirements.
- UE drafts a UI design (prototype and specification).
- BA makes more revisions now that they can visualize the UI.
- BA critiques the UI design from its perspective (match to requirements and perceived ease of use).
- UE refines the UI design, requests and receives graphics from a graphic designer, and incorporates the graphics.
- UE provides it to DEV.
- DEV critiques the UI design from its perspective (implementation difficulty and system performance).
- UE refines the UI design and provides the files that were used in the prototype to DEV, essentially providing the visual front-end of the application.
- UE provides the UI design to DOC.
- DOC critiques the UI design from its perspective (ease of explaining it to end users).
- UE refines the UI design.
- DOC drafts end-user documentation (hard copy and Help).
- UE critiques the end-user documentation.
- UE reviews the UI design with the entire team and makes final refinements.
- Following implementation, UE assists QA in UI testing (identifying mismatches between design and implementation).
Both Chandan and Jack presented case studies in which they have applied the UE process outlined above. These projects highlighted the successes and challenges that the team has faced, as well as some of the lessons learned.
In conclusion, Jack shared some of the keys to the successful introduction and integration of the UE discipline at IPS-Sendero that may be helpful to others who are trying to do this within their own company or, as consultants, within client companies:
- Take charge.
- Demonstrate unique skills.
- Speed up the development process (or at least don't slow it down).
- Gather and respect everyone's input.
- Help others do their jobs.
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