16 September 2009

Bernhard Pichler, managing director of informare Consulting and founder of the European Forum for Extended Usability (EF.EU), discusses the forum and its aims.

Why is usability relevant?
Usability has one clear focus: to enable people to do their job more efficiently. Most jobs involve a huge amount of interaction with automated systems. People need to retrieve information from maybe thousands of cases very quickly and with the assurance that they will pick up the significant parts. Usability studies take into account how humans look for significance and structure information – for example, by size and position, or data mapping. Modern technologies enable designers and developers to visualise raw data meaningfully and make it easy to read. Together with some simple rules that can be evaluated in questionnaires, this makes the difference.

To enable people to work efficiently, the most important thing is to establish a basic trust between the human being and the system. Reliability and performance, responsiveness and the possibility to predict and undo each action are basic factors for such trust building. Reducing the steps that need to be performed, adding wizards for common tasks and hiding millions of options that tend to confuse more than to solve a problem, are milestones for better software. Usability is about much more than good-looking applications and a perfect experience. But, if the job is done well, people will love to use your solution – another contribution to improved efficiency. So, usability saves money and improves employee productivity.

Why do we rarely find software that really targets these needs?
First of all, usability is something that you have to invest in. Studies show that in the end it is much cheaper to take these issues into account long before users complain about processes that hinder, rather than solve an issue. There is no single definition of ‘the user’. Users have preferences, and depending on what their job is within the application they have different needs. So product managers need to identify user groups, and software architects have to design systems adaptable to multiple types of users.

Time to market still gets more attention from CEOs than the fact that the period for which you use software is much longer than the time it takes to install or deploy it. Thus, usability is often seen as something that will follow once everything else is done.

But besides that, there are structural obstacles in the lifecycle of software development: even though the requirements are done by a team of product managers and architects, developers and designers have a huge influence on how the software can be used in the end. If you do not set up rules and evaluate prototypes from the very beginning, it is hard to get the usability mindset into the brains of the whole team.

If you do not set up rules and evaluate prototypes from the very beginning, it is hard to get the usability mindset into the brains of the whole team

Bernhard Pichler, informare Consulting  Developers follow constraints and designer ‘cool’. It is vital to have an advocate of the user within your team. Let’s demonstrate this in a simple example: 90 per cent of the cars in the US have automatic gearboxes. But 90 per cent of the developers drive gearshift cars. If developers designed a car cockpit it would look like a plane, with millions of options and buttons. And designers would add nice animated graphs about motor heat development – instead of ensuring that the brakes work on wet roads too.

My hope is that the financial crisis will force companies to spend more money on making software relevant and efficient. Because in hard times, only software that someone can understand will be sold.

What is the thought behind EF.EU?
As shown above, usability is something that covers many skills and targets many branches. And it is undergoing a fluent change process: new devices like Microsoft Surface and new technologies like Silverlight come to market and the question now is not ‘what can be done’, but ‘with all these options, what is it useful to do?’ It is not possible for a single person to cover all the skills needed – often not even for an entire company.

So the basic thought is to build a network of leading partners into each category and let them work together to build the best for the customer. There are companies that have specialised in 3D artwork; others know how to develop for large screens. And both are dedicated not only to making compelling software, but also to following the principles of efficient user-computer communication. It is important that designers understand what developers need and vice versa. By having this network we eliminate unnecessary round trips between partners, and unnecessary costs for software projects.

We have partnerships with universities to bring in their psychological know-how into the process of software evolution. Together with this mix of competences and a clear vision, we drive innovation within IT.

What benefit can EF.EU bring to a company?
Our strategy is to give each customer the right mix of the services they need. The forum consults companies about new technologies or strategies to follow. It offers design services whenever needed and reviews current systems and applications. Each company can reflect on how efficient their system is to address the tasks needed.

Whoever has worked within a cluster knows that one plus one is more than two. So we can offer our services at low costs. Evaluating results with end users is what makes usability significant. The time is right to make usability a key performance indicator of business success.

This article first appeared in the 2009/10 edition of the Prime Partner Guide.

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