| According to International Standards
Organization (ISO), the user experience is directly linked to the
intuitiveness, efficiency and learnability of the user interface.
To put it simply, its about making it easy for the user to accomplish
the tasks they set out to do. On average, users are only able to
complete 42% of tasks on an untested site.
Usability Engineering dates back to World War II. Psychologists
were called in to help layout aircraft cockpits. They studied pilots
and arranged the instruments to optimize visual performance. In
the area of software, the field goes back about 30 years and was
applied to mainframe systems.
Basically, usability engineering is a branch of applied psychology.
In order to design the user experience you must understand how people
perform.
- All caps reduce reading speed by up to 20%.
- Signal detection theory tell us that more than 6 colors in a
page creates too much 'noise', thus making the whole page a blur
to the user.
- The human brain finds it hard to comprehend 4 nouns in a row
(e.g. PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT QUALITY CONTROL).
- The human eye tends to move from a high contrast image to a
low contrast image.
- 100 characters per line optimizes reading speed.
Most companies tell you that they understand usability. Some companies
think usability is simply about cutting down on download speed.
Unfortunately, there's a lot more to it than just that.
Most organizations realize that ease-of-use is important but they
don't know HOW to make things usable.
This is because, according to IBM (User
Engineering) and Microsoft (Usability
in the Development Process), traditional software development
methods simply do not allow for user centric design.
Usability engineering solves this problem with the User Centric
Process. It is a method of designing ease-of-use into a system.
| About the author |
 |
Gul Amir Khan is the Chief Usability Consultant for MicroUsability and the current President of the Usability Professional's Association (Singapore Chapter). Gul has been trained in Game Theory and Strategic Behavior Analysis and has incorporated these techniques in web usability engineering. He has conducted numerous usability projects and usability workshops across Asia. |
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