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13 years ago this month I sent my book, E-Commerce Usability, to the publishers. I found myself flicking through a copy this week and re-discovered a “Usability Maturity” quiz that I created for the book. These questions are just as relevant today as they were 13 years ago.
I often tell people that the great thing about taking a user centred approach to design is that people don’t change much over time, whereas technology changes rapidly. So focusing on users is a great way to future proof your designs. And the same thing occurred to me as I looked over the quiz: the kinds of question I was asking 13 years ago to measure an organisation’s usability maturity are still just as relevant today.
The original set of questions were focused on e-commerce sites specifically, so I’ve now re-phrased some of them so they refer to any product, service and any application area.
You can use the results of this test as a “before” and “after” measure of your organisation’s usability maturity, or you can use it to identify particular areas for improvement. You can also use it as a checklist after you complete each phase of the design to check that you’ve addressed the key issues.
I’ve split the questions into broad groups that cover business analysis, user research, design and deployment. I’ve deliberately avoided tying it to any specific development methodology, so you can ask these questions whether your approach is waterfall or agile. The only assumption about your development process is that there’s an opportunity for iteration.
Treat these as YES/NO questions, and use them to generate team discussion about where there might be room for improvement in your design and development process.
This step provides the business context for the design activity. You begin by identifying the stakeholders for your new development. This includes all those people who have an interest in the success or failure of the product or service, such as management, technical support and regulatory bodies in the industry. Next you identify your user experience vision: your view of what using the product or service will be like 5 years or so in the future. This provides a design target that you can use to ensure you are progressing towards your design goals. The final part of this step is to segment the market, so you can identify the key user group that will become the focus of your design solution.
Questions to ask:
In this step, you aim to build a rich description of users, the environment in which they use the product or service and the critical tasks they want to carry out with it. You begin by building user profiles: a set of personas that describe the goals and behaviours of the key user groups. Next, you create environment profiles: descriptions of the social, technical and physical environment within which the product or service will be used. Finally, you identify red routes: a list of the critical tasks that users need to carry out easily and successfully for the system to be a success.
Questions to ask:
This step is an iterative process. You start the process by developing key performance indicators: quantitative measures, based on key user and business requirements, that the management team use to determine if the design is ready to launch. You then move on to develop the information architecture: the high-level, conceptual model, showing how all of the functions and features will hang together. Next, you create prototypes, starting with paper sketches and then moving onto more interactive prototypes. The final part of this iterative loop is to evaluate usability by asking potential users to carry out realistic tasks.
Questions to ask:
To paraphrase Winston Churchill: this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. This is the end of the beginning. In this step you find out how your product or service was actually used in practice and use these insights to drive the next release of the product or service, or to design a future product.
Questions to ask:
Dr. David Travis (@userfocus) has been carrying out ethnographic field research and running product usability tests since 1989. He has published three books on user experience including Think Like a UX Researcher. If you like his articles, you might enjoy his free online user experience course.
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This article is tagged strategy.
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