ThoughtWorks Geek Night on Usability

On Saturday, 20 September, ThoughtWorks Pune hosted a public Geek Night. The topic was Usability and UI Design with guest speaker Abhijit Thosar. It isn't often that we have a guest speaker in our Geek Nights, typically it's a show run by TWers, but I'm glad that we invited Abhijit to speak this time. Abhijit definitely is an expert in his field: he had a lot of insights, spoke with examples and experience, had good case studies to share. Perhaps the people who came to know about our Geek Night (via personal invites or mailing-lists) predicted this about Abhijit too: we had over 100 registrations within a week, and a good turnout despite heavy rains (about 40, not counting TWers).

We were to start at 2pm but because Abhijit got delayed due to traffic by about 15 mins, Chirag, Alpesh and I tried getting a discussion going with the attendees who'd come in already. Once Abhijit arrived, Chirag gave an intro to our Geek Night concept, and then Aditya introduced Abhijit. The session was to last till 3.30pm but because there was a good number of questions and discussions towards the end, it ran till about 4.45pm.

Abhijit had interesting things to share about Usability. I'm listing what stood out for me:

- Usability as an applied discipline came up in World War II, primarily for aircraft controls which before undergoing standardization from a usability-standpoint were prone to human errors in combat situations. For eg, the flap control and the landing control, which were placed closely, had a similar feel to start with; these were later changed such that the flap control felt like a rubber flap and the landing control was given a tyre texture. Now pilots didn't need to look down at the controls to know which is which but could continue concentrating on what was happening outside the aircraft and recognize the controls by just their feel.

- Knowing the end-users of a software and their mental map of how to go about doing things is important. User interviews are essential.

- Focusing on user experience and UI early on is important as the later it gets, the harder it is to make fundamental changes in the backend.

- There are clients who'd say that their software's end-users are going to be "anybody and everybody" (eg. internet banking sites). That's recipe for failure.

- Usability is a mindset change that an organization needs to undergo before they can derive value out of it. Usually it takes a good amount of convincing, and business stakeholders normally want to hear numbers of how usuability helps sales/productivity. Different metrics help on a case-to-case basis. These could be web page usage trends, number of clicks, or a peak in number of users after UI changes, etc.

- Usability is a science as well as an art. Science because there are techniques for deriving mental maps or user action flows and so on. Also, physiological information like knowing how the eye focuses differently for different colours, or what the average arm span for a person is, etc, help in designing different interfaces or products. Usability is an art because knowledge from the arts like painting are used to bring focus on essential user flows. This is where knowing how colours work together, or what typography works where, or what layouts/compositions are appropriate, etc, come in handy.

- Abhijit had to work with CAD software in Japan and they did not have English versions. All buttons and menu items looked the same so Abhijit had to memorize each according to position. If the software had a more user-centered interface, eg. with appropriate button icons, Abhijit might have had an easier time.

- When asked to design an "Executive Dashboard", it struck Abhijit that the end-users were probably over 50 and taking that into account, he went for bigger fonts, clear interface, a widget-less design.

- Abhijit informed that about 9% of men are colour-blind (to varying degrees) compared to just 0.5% of women. Such things do play a role in UI design at times.

- There is technology these days that monitor how a person's eye balls move across the screen when a page opens in front, and this provides information about how well the interface in front is designed.

- Developers need to up their game, and focusing on usability is one way: developers make choices almost everyday which impact user experience and hence they should be careful. Even if they get their UI work reviewed by non-teammates once in a while, it'll provide some indicators. Picking up pointers on usability will help significantly of course: http://www.usability.gov

After the talk, folks gathered in the pantry for snacks and got good discussions going. We presented Abhijit with a momento. He was pretty impressed with our office... said it had an "industrial feel" to it 'cos of the high ceiling.

Looking forward to more of such events in TW Pune. My thanks to Aditya, Nigel and Chirag for helping out with the Geek Night.

Tags: technology:events, technology:thoughtworks Last modified 19:05 Sat, 4 Oct 2008 by Main. Accessed 183 times Children What Links Here Share Except where expressly noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.