Useful Usability: Interview with Dr. Deborah J. Mayhew

SUMMARY:  In this interview, I answer 9 questions posed by Craig Tomlin, author of the Useful Usability blog. Questions include how usability engineering fits into the Agile development method, and if usability consultants should be willing to guarantee results from their work. This interview was published on July 1, 2009.

SUMMARY:  This brief article is an adapted excerpt from chapter 3, “A Basic Framework”, by Mayhew and Tremaine, in Bias and Mayhew's second edition of Cost-Justifying Usability (2005.) It presents a framework and example for cost-justifying usability engineering efforts during web development projects by describing how to calculate the costs and estimate the benefits of the Usability Engineering Lifecycle tasks (Mayhew, 1999) that can potentially be applied during the project.

Making a Business Case for Usability: Four Real Life Stories

SUMMARY:  In my experience, one of the best ways to “sell” (i.e., win funding for) usability engineering services in software and web development organizations is by laying out a structured and detailed proposal for our services, and then preparing an objective cost justification of our proposal. This is true regardless of whether we are an internal usability engineer or an external usability consultant. In this brief article, I offer four real life cost-justification case studies, and provide links to a free downloadable tool as well as to resources for learning more about how to cost-justify usability engineering services.

This article was originally published at *www.techsmith.com.

Usability Testing: You Get What You Pay For

SUMMARY:  A valid and useful usability test takes time and expertise. Shortcuts and lack of rigorous controls invariably reduce the validity and usefulness of the data generated by the test. Here I offer a description of some of the key ingredients of a good usability test (for more detail, see Mayhew, 1999), and some examples of poorly designed or run testing.

This article was originally published at * www.taskz.com

Investing in Requirements Analysis

SUMMARY:  In my experience as a usability engineering consultant, requirements analysis is still often a hard sell. While clients understand design, and seem to intuitively grasp the value of objective usability testing, they are often impatient to get to design, and reluctant to invest time and money in requirements analysis. Or, they believe they already understand requirements, through traditional systems analysis techniques. My goal in this article is to demonstrate the importance and payoff of investing in usability requirements analysis tasks by providing real world examples of the results of investing - or not investing - in this part of the Usability Engineering Lifecycle.

This article was originally published at *www.taskz.com.

SUMMARY:  A few years ago, the term discount usability engineering (UE) was coined, and the concept became popular. The idea was that the UE field needed to provide faster and cheaper ways to insure usability during product development. This was partly in response to the fact that investment in usability has always been a hard sell in the software development industry, but mostly in response to the fast-paced and cost-conscious development cycles of early web sites. Traditional UE methods such as task analysis and formal usability testing are fairly time-intensive (and thus also expensive), and did not seem to fit in well with typical early Web development projects. For example, whereas I have often conducted Task Analyses that took several months to complete, and usability tests that took a month or more, I have also worked on Web development projects that from start to launch took a total 8-12 weeks. Clearly you cannot spend several months conducting Task Analyses - just the first step in the UE process - when the whole project must be completed in 2-3 months!

This article was originally published at *www.taskz.com

Keystroke Level Modeling as a Cost Justification Tool

SUMMARY:  Keystroke level modeling (Card, Moran & Newell, 1983) is one of a variety of cognitive modeling techniques that have been reported in the literature over the last two decades. Cognitive modeling, simply put, involves identifying and counting all the discrete human operations - physical (e.g., mouse click, keystroke), cognitive (e.g., read or speak a syllable of text, make a mental comparison) and perceptual (e.g. locate something on screen) - that a user must execute in order to most efficiently accomplish a specific task on a specific user interface design. System response time operators are then added to the model where appropriate. Time values for each operator (available in the literature for human operators) are then plugged into a task model to predict a total task time. The total task times generated by such models predict the fastest time (on average) that highly trained and experienced users will be able to perform a given task on a given user interface with a given set of system response times, assuming they perform the task with no errors.

This article was originally published at *www.taskz.com