Usability Session in ST. Marks Hotel

No sooner had I got down from the Richmond flyover, my mobile started to beep. It was Nancy calling me from Hyderabad, and she was excited that I was going to be a part of CHI Bangalore event. "Dude, please collect all the information and share it with us".It wasn’t Nancy alone; I had received requests from my closest buddies- Sowmya, Greshma,Alex, Naveen, and all that they wished to know was what the event was all about. I could never say NO to this folks. Though it was my sleeping time,but thanks friends for getting me engaged me in an activity. Surely, you guys owe me a lot.

22nd March of 2007, and I reached at dotted 3pm in St.Marks Hotel,Bangalore collected my badge and an envelope from the organizers. The room was neatly organized with a capacity of almost 100 people. Almost 30 people had steamed over; I had a quick glance at the memory pad. Companies like Yahoo, SAP Labs, Arcot, Infosys (only me) and some freelancers were to be seen. Notwithstanding, students from designing schools like Sristhi, Akashpradeep etc had also come. Some familiar faces in the crowd and I was quick to acknowledge the greetings. Oh! did I forget to mention, I donned the coat of Bangalore Technical Writers Meetup organizer for the first time in that venue only.

The session started at 3:05pm. Sarit Arora welcomed all the dignitaries, participants and the audiences and briefly gave a walk through of the event’s activities. In hindsight, Sarit detailed out the HFI activities in the run to last year in designing and usability, getting more designing schools in place and the HFI’s plan of action for future. Without wasting much time, Sarit invited the first guest speaker Joseph Kaye to the podium. Joseph Kaye or popularly known as Jofish is a well-known name in the field of usability and design. Joseph Kaye is currently doing his thesis from Cornell university, US. Jofish started his presentation by identifying things that he won’t be speaking.

First of he pointed out Usability is not dead, dead as explained by gurus and there’s a subtle of difference between experimental psychologists and testing. Jofish discussed ways to think about experience- focused HCI rather than task-focused. Jofish used his own experiences to show this. He took long-term relationships in account where in he said that a website like http://intimateobjects.org/ has special icons that can be used over IM to express your emotions to your partner. At any instant of time, if you logged into say 8 in the morning, elated to get your partner online and clicked a red icon to show your happiness. The icon appears in your partner’s window and fades away with time. A similar thing happens in your window too when your partner selects an icon. What it clearly shows is the status and emotion related to your partner in the next 24 hours as he or starts missing you. In a nutshell: Designing helps and when it is linked to usability it rocks.

Next, Jofish took a little step forward and touched upon- who are the users, evaluators, limiting factors? He also spoke in detailed about the work done by him on the ‘happy home’ relationships. The experiment conducted by them was in form of placing cameras in the house water tank. For days they recorded the amount of water from the shower fell and at certain time when it was less, they knew certain tension was in.

Next, Jofish spoke about the usability of mini laptops. During a research conducted by a set of experts, they found that the HR team used to face the venom of candidates or employees when taking notes on a computer. Humans like to face the audience when they speak and they are somewhat lost or disturbed when it doesn’t happen. The effects as a result is tremendous and far more negative as one can ever think of. Finally, Jofish spoke on sexual interactions and believes that to keep a relationship lively it’s important that partners indulge in tipsy things-maybe a nudge to each other while getting a coke from the fridge, or a nice peck to him/her while going to the office.

Next, Jofish was addressed to a whole set of questions with your’s truly asking him the success criteria for documentation and the work done in the arena of usability testing for documentation. Jo wasn’t too confident to respond to that and directed the question to Dr. Eric Schaffer, CEO of HFI. Eric stressed on the user content to be simple and clear of any technical, grammatical lapses. In addition, he informed that users’ chances of using help systems were minimal and they hardly use it. He went to the extent of declaring documentation unusable and dead.

Next, there was a break of half an hour wherein we relished pastries, sandwiches and coffee. The attendees got a chance to interact with rest and the room was filled with usability and designing discussion. A beaming sense of freshness and vigor was experienced as participants steamed to hear Dr. Eric’s discussion on PETscan.

Dr.Eric started with a brief background of works done by him for the last 25 years in the area of usability designing and his challenges as the CEO of HFI. Eric detailed out on the importance of persuasion, emotion and trust for a user’s testing and spoke on the PETscan technique-Eyetracking. On an issue that eyetracking is not feasible for small time companies, he said you get what you pay for. Also, he stressed on the importance of Brand. He believes a website like Amazon scores over its contempories because of the brand tag and the organization of the website.

Regarding a query from your's truly on the importance of Help system, Dr.Eric felt that the objective of technical documentation is wrong in India. If you want people to use Help simply build a bad user interface and make sure to very highly motivate the users. Obvious a silly idea, but it meets your objective. The real objective, of course, is to ensure good performance and satisfaction. This is unlikely to occur from a good Help system. Instead design the interface so it is self-evident and needs no Help. Unless you really force people, they will not normally use Help. You can write WONDERFUL Help. But people just don't use it often. In fact, a good place to hide things is under the Help button.

He cited his real-life experiences to speak on customers who are hesitant enough to use Help. Generally, he believes that the only really appropriate Help facility is for answering very specific questions about a single field. When I questioned him about the metrics for Help, he said that there are various ways to look at it. You can measure the number of times Help is accessed (this is mostly a measure of how bad the interface design is). You can have an exit survey asking if the Help answered the user's question. Also, you can more specifically set users tasks, have the users try to complete them in a usability testing environment and see what happens when they access Help (very important and highly recommended).

Eric next spoke on the site maps, navigation tool etc. all these are too much for me to put here. Maybe I will talk to you guys on some weeknight. I had a great time attending the session, learnt a lot, met some usability designers’ friends, got a chance to share my knowledge and yes, I am putting this in practice too. Just a note before I sign off: usability is not dead; it is very much prevalent and as a caution designing without usability is a sheer time waste. So the next time, you work on an application or document something, please do spare a moment to get the users in action.