Here is a quick primer on usability and how it fits into the development cycle.

1. Usability and Testing
Code for Kansas City
Fall 2015
Elliott

2. We tested the MWSU website
List of Faculty Emails?
Police Department Phone Number?
Application Forms?
Academic Calendar?
Campus Address?
Campus Map that makes sense?

3. Usability is lots of
different things to
lots of different people.
•Usefulness (utility) + Reliability (it
works) + usable (ease of use)=
usability

4. Process with many different
aspects and professionals
• User Interface Designers
• How should the interface look?
• What is the best color?
• Interaction Designers
• Why should I use drop down menus?
• What should happen when the user clicks on this?
• What type of interaction will given the user the best experience?
• Usability Researchers
• Who are my users?
• What do they like, hate about this site?
• Where can I improve the site?

5. Why do I care?
• What are your questions about your site?
• How do I make this hip?
• Designers are about the look and feel of the site
• What do the users want?
• Researchers are about testing and writing reports with more
information than you currently need.
• How will the users use this thing?
• What problems will they have?
• What will they like, dislike?

6. Why do I need research?
• You and your friends and family are not the users of the
application.
• You will not tell yourself the truth
• Your friends and family may not tell you the truth
• It is possible that no one can tell you the truth about your
application.
• Explicit and Implicit Knowledge
• Explicit knowledge is stuff that you know.
• The ??? phone rarely works as promised.
• Implicit knowledge is stuff that you cannot say but know.
• Show me…

7. User Testing = implicit knowledge
• We measure three things.
• 1. time on task- efficiency
• 2. errors/reliability- effectiveness
• 3. satisfaction (usability, usefulness, learnability and liking it).
• People will say one thing
• Yes, I would use this a lot.
• But, they will do another
• I get frustrated when I look for the change projects button and
have to go through 5 screens to find it.
• Going through all of these screens is so frustrating, it makes me
want to not use the application.

8. How do we build a test…
• We ask you questions… and you reply
• Who are the users?
• People who are interested in learning more about their
neighborhoods.
• What are they supposed to do with the application?
• Find community gardens
• Add a project
• Change a project
• Do you have specific development questions
• Should we add a social network link?

9. Then we build the test
• What does the user need to know to do the test?
• How would the user normally use this application?
• Are the people that we are testing the same as the actual
users?
• How will we record the data?
• Will the users use our system or their own? Is it important?
• Are there other variables that would impact the user’s
feedback that we should control for?
• Do we have an interface?
• What other information can we gather that would be helpful
for development?

10. Usability
does not
happen
alone
• Bevan, N. (1995). Usability is quality of use. Proceedings of the 6th International
Conference on Human Computer Interaction. Yokohama, Japan: Elsevier. p. 5.

11. What do you do with the test
results now?
• The document might be overwhelming.
• 1. go to the development questions that you had.
• Should we have a social media link?
• Yes for Community KC
• 2. What tasks were difficult for the users?
• Is there anything that you can do from a development side to
make it easier?
• Is there anything that you can do from an interface instruction
side to make users understand it better? (onboarding)
• 3. What did the users like/dislike about the app?
• Don’t mess with the things that they liked
• Pay attention to the dislikes, can you fix it?

12. As you develop…
• Watch the videos of how people used it.
• What did they say?
• Where did they go?
As you resolve issues, test again.
The user test is information.
You can choose to use it or not.
Sometimes you are unable to fix everything.
In general, if 2 or more users have a problem, it should be fixed.

13. The end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is2O666qDPs
• A great video from Harvard