Wake Up! Fix it!: Analyse

So, you are a usability expert. You've been set the task of creating a new usable design for a hotel alarm. What do you do?

You have already explored the problem design and some others.

As an expert you can do better than just exploring existing designs. You can draw on the power of an "analytical" method. Big word. Really it just means thinking about the problem. That is what you are doing already. The power is in the other word: "method". What it means is "give structure to your thinking": follow a fixed process that helps focus your attention on the things that matter. A good method can give you insight not only into what the problems are, but why they are problems. Understanding the "why" is critical if you are going to remove a problem.

To see why "WHY?" is so important, think of a trivial example. Suppose you know people are having trouble with Snooze on a particular design of radio alarm. The alarm goes off, they reach out to hit snooze, go back to sleep, but the alarm doesn't go off again. Aha! you say they are hitting the off button by mistake. You notice that the Snooze button isn't actually labelled. That must be why. In your design you add the word "SNOOZE" to the button. Snooze sticky labels are dispatched to every room in the hotel. Problem solved.

No. The problems continue. In fact just a many people have the problem as before. They are still pressing the off button. You got the "Why?" wrong. It turns out, people do know where the Snooze button is. It is just that this particular alarm the off button is right next to the snooze button. When a sleepy person reaches for Snooze they are just as likely to hit off by mistake as the right button. Snooze needs to be bigger with the alarm shaped so it is a natural place for your hand to go. Off needs to be somewhere else and less sensitive perhaps. Just knowing what happens doesn't always help. Knowing why the problem happens means you are more likely to fix it.

Different methods give different kinds of insights. One method might focus on problems to do with people making mistakes. Another might give insight into why people find it difficult to recover when they have made a mistake.

Want to learn a method that you can use to analyse interactive systems of all kinds to suggest problems that might make them hard to use on first use? Time to do a walkthrough.

The wake-up. Fix it! series of cs4fn articles is based on a Science Week activity organised by the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London, with support from the Research Councils UK.