Feature: Use, Usability and UML

Somewhere in hyper-space sits my half-filled shopping trolley. It's been there for about a year now, and I can look at it every time I return to the site of a well-known grocery chain, at whose real-life hyper-markets I spend about £100, about 30 times a year.

Try as I might with the fiendish forms, I couldn't fill the "trolley" fast enough with enough bulky and expensive items to make the most of the delivery service and charge. I couldn't find packs of cinnamon bagels. I couldn't easily compare the costs across brands. My usual fascination - 2 for 1 offers - became invisible. The final straw was when I selected 200g of "wrapped cheese", priced by the kilo. The cost of a full kilo was added to my running total.

The strange thing is, that thanks to my loyalty card over the last few years, this company knows exactly what I buy, what offers tempt me and with which products I am brand-promiscuous (or price-sensitive!). Despite it being lauded as one of the more "usable" e-commerce sites, I couldn't carry out my normal shopping activities there. Yet, as a frequent online shopper, and responsible for children who are no longer an asset near trolleys, I would love to save time, and do business at this (or their competitor's) site.

Anyone who designs software systems will recognise that those who created this site must not have modelled these predictable patterns of behaviour. People like me were not adequately considered as potential users of the system, and so my activities were neither designed in, nor tested for. For whatever reason, data the enterprise already holds on me was not used in this system. My "case" was not "used".

There are many gurus who would suggest that usability faults cannot be detected until the system exists. To a certain extent this is true, and it is vital to look at what people do with systems, during development and after implementation. But it's also a cop-out. Shoppers like me don’t like to be guinea pigs. Just as with "quality" ten to fifteen years ago, we should recognise that "you can't test usability in".

Some of what systems architects need to know can be found out by letting users play with system prototypes, and usability labs are big business around the world. Now we can data-mine every eye movement and mouse click. The other technique is to model a system, visualise scenarios and evaluate "what ifs". To do this everyone involved - the developers, testers, customers and the customers' customers - need to be able to understand and contribute to the model under development.

In the last five years, one single set of notation has been arrived at through international standardisation - the Unified Modelling Language (UML). This involves a series of different, but interlocking, diagrammatic views of the proposed system. A continual process of refinement of these diagrams ensures that when the software is finally written, the system works as intended. Indeed, the writing of software is on the verge of being de-skilled from the process. From such diagrams, programmers in low-wage economies like Russia and India create systems. Tools, such as Rational Rose, already generate code directly from models. (Many would debate the quality, but it has been used successfully!)

I wouldn't be surprised if those who developed the online hyper-market had used UML throughout development, not least to ensure that the system connects with legacy systems for distribution and stock control. Public results suggest a qualified success. Yet they failed to model users like me; and I think I'm boringly normal.

Experts in the worlds of Usability and UML converge on Edinburgh on Friday 18th January for a symposium to explore this dilemma. How can usability be supported within UML? Is it already?

Various side issues come out of this, for example, can UML itself be made more usable?
This event is a convergence of several parties in Scotland dedicated to improving aspects of the ICT industry. ScotlandIS, the trade body for the ICT industry, and the British Human-Computer Interaction Group (a specialist group of the British Computer Society) find their overlap in the ScotlandIS Usability Forum. This is a coalition, drawn from in industry, public sector and academia, of around fifty of all those most active in these fields.

The ICT sector has gone through a major shakeout in the last few months. While some of this is due to economic slowdown, much is due to popping of pretensions. While we all love the freedom, imagination and creativity of dotcom cowboys, we would rather trust more measured progress. Yet there is a widespread perception that a single empathetic and skilled programmer can create a better solution in weeks than a team debating diagrams and user needs can in months. Extreme Programming is a recent popular manifestation of this - being proactive rather than reactive to users' needs.

To avoid re-inventing the wheel, and repeating old mistakes, developers use documentation for reflective design. To get buy-in from users, we involve them at every stage of the process in a way that they feel their contribution is valued - but all to often this is by trying out incomplete software on them and changing it to match their responses; repeatedly.

Can we model user-centred solutions? On Friday at the St Trinnean's Room, Pollock Halls, Edinburgh, I hope to find out. Meanwhile I've got to go and get the shopping.

Tom McEwan
Napier University

Associated Link: Usability and UML

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