TRANSFORMING THE PRACTICE OF USABILITY: FROM

MAXIMIZING EFFICIENCY TO ENGINEERING SATISFACTION

Jared Braiterman, Ph.D.

JaredResearchjaredRESEARCH, San Francisco, CA
braiterman@acm.orgjared@jaredresearch.com

Patrick Larvie, Ph.D.

Small Pond Studios, San Francisco, CA
Patrick@smallpondstudios.com

Workshop Proposal for CHI 2002 – Minneapolis, MN

Recent transformations in the role of usability professionals:

Increasingly, usability practitioners are responsible for interactive products whose success
depends as much on desirability as on usability. As competition in business, home and leisure
markets intensifies, project success depends on qualities that go beyond ease of use, engaging
aspects of user experience that are not typically contemplated by traditional usability methods.
New applications must consider not only the objective needs of the users, but also their subjective
state: what is the state of mind of the user as she goes about her day? Should the look and feel of
the interface support the user’s lack of skill or her technical prowess? Even if the application is
intended to accomplish work related tasks, will it be expected to provide amusement or
inspiration? Unlike business and home software products of the past, for an application to be
successful in today’s competitive market it must not only be easy to use and effective, it must
also offer a broader sense of satisfaction. now requires product design that delivers satisfactions
and engages consumers and workers from initial set up through ongoing usage.

This workshop gathers usability directors, interface designers and business managers who have
found that traditional usability methods are insufficient for understanding and designing for the
full range of user experience and that new approaches to development are required for designing
successful new applications. In recent years, qualitative techniques such as rapid ethnography,
character profiling and experience modeling have broadened the scope of CHI professionals’
development work. These techniques reflect an increasing concern with understanding end-users’
every day lives and habits, both off and on-line, as well as the value of this knowledge in the
development of new business and leisure applications. In themselves, these techniques do not
guarantee improved results. In fact, taking a “multidisciplinary” approach to design and
development problems often creates its own problems: how can usability professionals ensure
that multiple perspectives are included in their work? How can usability specialists effectively
communicate with their colleagues from other disciplines such as visual design, marketing and
software engineering?

While CHI professionals working in applied contexts have benefited from recent methodological
insights, relatively less progress has been made in implementing new approaches to research and
development. Many usability professionals have little experience working with qualitative
methods, especially those that require incursions into users’ “native” environments. Many
usability professionals work in isolation from others with key roles in the development process.
Corporate structures and professional development tracks often contribute to this problem,
keeping usability practitioners distant from colleagues in adjacent fields.

These are key challenges to applying the principles of computer human interaction to the
problems of product and application development. Changes in functionality and usability

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requirements have been accompanied by a need toChanging market conditions and a new
emphasis on adoption and persuasion highlight the need to understand branding, business
strategy, product positioning and the overall affective experience of end users. Older and more
familiar methods must now be combined with newer qualitative techniques to ensure a positive
and productive user experience that often begins before the application comes out of the box.
Methods such as ethnography, character profiling and experience modeling can be deployed to
map the relationships between technical requirements and business opportunities across the
product development cycle. Usability professionals must not only understand how to implement
new research techniques, they must become adept at re-imagining the development process in
collaboration with professionals from other disciplines.

Workshop Goals
The goal of this workshop is to explore research and development techniques that integrate
traditional usability methods (testing, task analysis, requirements gathering, iterative design,
heuristic evaluation) with new qualitative techniques (rapid ethnography, character profiling,
experience modeling). We will also explore the impact that these new ways of working have on
communication with our colleagues, especially as they concern collaboration with visual
designers, brand marketers, developers and business leaders throughout the development cycle.
We will focus especially on forms of collaboration we see as vital to the next generation of
usability professionals, such as those that bring designers, developers, programmers and
engineers into the research process at every phase of product development cycle.

The workshop will provide an opportunity for seasoned professionals to exchange knowledge and
experience, to learn about changes in the practice of usability and to re-imagine their roles within
the development of products and applications. Participants will gain hands-on experience
designing new test plans and new ways of communicating test results to multi-disciplinary teams.
While participants need not be experienced with the techniques described here, they will be
expected to offer perspectives informed by specialized study of or work in user-centered
approaches to product and application development.

By including participants with diverse backgrounds (usability, design, business management), the
workshop will provide a real-world opportunity to design collaborative work processes and to
communicate results to broader audiences. We expect participants to help each other gain a better
sense of how new methods can improve the product development cycle and how to create and
maintain meaningful dialogue with colleagues from other disciplines.

Workshop Format:
Participants should expect to spend a full day preparing for the workshop by submitting a position
paper (see below for instructions) and reviewing other participants’ submissions. Organizers will
analyze participant submissions and create archetypes for small group activity during the
workshop. Workshop activities will include collaborative analysis of case studies, brainstorming
around the evolution of our roles and a review of new research methods. Working in small
groups, participants will analyze a development problem and formulate a collaborative research
plan. Each small group will also detail a communication strategy to ensure that research results
are communicated to a multi-disciplinary product development team in a useful manner. Each
group’s work will be presented and critiqued collectively at the end of the session.

Immediately following the workshop, the facilitators will prepare and distribute a synopsis of
activities to share with the professional community through the CHI bulletin. If sufficient interest
exists, the results of the workshop might lead to the preparation of one or more articles describing

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new approaches to usability for publication in specialized journals. The organizers will assemble
participant position papers and output from the workshop into a public web site.

Participant Selection:
Participants should have experience as usability specialists, designers, information architects or
business managers. They should prepare a 3-4 page position paper including:

1. A brief professional autobiography (training, experience, present position)

2. A description of a problem from their own work, or a problem they have found
elsewhere, in which there was a discrepancy between an application or product’s
usefulness, usability and desirability. This description should include the nature of
the discrepancy, as well as an account of what – if anything- was done to address it.
Participants are encouraged to share stories in which their efforts were not successful,
or to describe problems that have not yet been addressed.

3. A statement describing current challenges to creating desirable, useful and usable

products or applications. Participants should identify at least three areas in which
they would like to improve their abilities, or to increase their understanding of phases
in the product development cycle with which they are currently unfamiliar.
Participants might also mention the methods with which they are familiar and have
attained competence, as well as those with which they are currently unfamiliar.

Organizers’ Backgrounds:
Jared Braiterman, Ph.D. is a specialist in experience design, customer research and usability. He
has extensive experience working in private industry (Studio Archetype, Sapient, Shutterfly,
Small Pond Studios)design agencies and startups for companies including Hewlett Packard,
EXPN, Peets Coffee and Shutterfly, where he led multi-disciplinary teams in the development of
software and graphic user interfaces. He led a workshop on the use of ethnographic techniques at
the meetings of the Australian Society for Computer Human Interaction, has lectured at Stanford
University and published articles on the challenges of maintaining a user-centered approach in
fast-paced enterprise application development. He earned his Ph.D. in Ccultural Aanthropology
from Stanford University. Currently, he is the principle of JaredResearchjaredRESEARCH.

Patrick Larvie, Ph.D. is currently the director of experience design at Small Pond Studios, a San
Francisco, CA consultancy specializing in interactive media. He has led research teams in the US
and Latin America on investigatingons of the ways that populations without easy access to
telecommunications and computers might use Internet technologies in their every day lives. He
has conducted usability studies for private sector clients including Macromedia, Citibank and
Leap Frog, a manufacturer of Internet enabled educational toys. He earned his Ph.D. from the
University of Chicago.

Technical Requirements:
The workshop will require a live Internet connection, projection equipment (projector compatible
with Windows and MaciInstosh cComputers and a surface for viewing), a white board and flip
charts.

Dissemination of Workshop Results:

Participants’ position papers will be posted on a web site prior to the workshop. A synopsis of
workshop activities will be prepared by the facilitators for publication in the CHI Bulletin. If

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there is sufficient interest among participants, one or more articles on the challenges facing
contemporary usability specialists might be prepared for publication in specialized journals.

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250 Word Abstract

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Extended Abstract