Feature: Dave Roberts of IBM Ease of Use asks What's Needed?

What do we need to create usable things? Here's my personal perspective on that question. I've been in this game for a while now and I have gone though the many phases that 'usability' in all its forms seems to have followed. In the 80s the style guide was often thought to be THE answer and we sought out better and better guides. We found that this was not a sufficient answer. So we relegated style guides to an appropriate back shelf and moved on. As we turned into the 90s we wanted more transparently object-oriented interfaces, more consistent design processes and metrics integrated in the process.

As our wishes came true and the interface style changed for the better, someone threw in what my colleagues from USA would call a curved-ball (perhaps bouncer to the cricket lovers out there) and the web emerged as the new answer to everything. So we accommodated that and carried on with the quest for better methods and integrated metrics.

Now we are in a new millennium, and a few more bouncers have been cast in our direction (three dimensions, mobile or pervasive, interactive TV...). But despite each of these I feel the challenge remains the same as it was back in the early 90s: we need to have the right methods and the right metrics. So where are we on that issue? Well, I am part of a growing community that feel that object orient methods based somewhat on software engineering practices are an important part of the answer. My first explorations in this direction came in the last of the large style guides that I helped to create. As part of the style guide we created a section on how to think about the user interface in an object oriented way and how to go about the design process. Dick Berry and I, both at IBM, developed this over the years and some colleagues helped us to publish this as OVID back in 1998. Although OVID is by no means a perfect method, and I never thought we did it justice in the book, I feel that it's a pointer to what we need.

First of all OVID is object oriented. This seems to fit both with the ultimate needs of the user and the needs of the designer to accumulate information from a variety of techniques. For the user, goals and work output are very easily expressed in terms of objects. So are the inputs that they need. For the designer, so many techniques analyse the world in terms of goals (expressed as the states of objects) and artefacts that I have not found one that does not fit into it. Secondly OVID is based on tools. It uses the power of a CASE tool to hold and coordinate all of the work-products. This allows teams to work on problems, and few problems that we deal with can be tackled without a team. But more than that, it allows disciplines to connect the work-products they own to a central core. And this allows the third key feature of a good method, communication. When one discipline can relate its work to that of another it allows for
>greater communication between the disciplines; everyone understands the context of another's remarks more clearly. And OVID tries to provide the central core as a set of UML based conventions that the whole team can understand. And conventions that elaborate the design as it continues without any significant discontinuities. The CASE tool with it's central core design also provides a fourth key feature, traceability. Features of a design can be connected back to the field studies, laboratory studies or market forces that lead to their creation.

So where does OVID take us? I think the answer is a new branch of engineering. As my handy dictionary says: "en·gi·neer·ing n.. Abbr. e., E., eng. 1.a. The application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends such as the design, manufacture, and operation of efficient and economical structures, machines, processes, and systems". We need to apply the vast array of things we have learned. We need to have a recognised process to do this. The process needs to: be object oriented, be tool based, have team communication at the core and be traceable. And I would say that all of that was relatively easy to achieve. Which leaves us the hard part that I have not mentioned for a while: metrics.

Having relegated the style guide and worked hard on methods I can finally answer the question: the missing ingredient is a good way to compare apples and oranges. How do I weigh the needs of one under-sampled population against another? How do I find the ultimate usability score of a product compared to its predecessor or its competitor? How do we compare the suitability to task of web sites addressing different markets? Each of these questions might be a do-or-die factor for a business project, but as far as I have seen we can only hint at the real answer. So if you are out there working on reliable metrics, let us all know.

Dave Roberts, IBM Ease of Use, Warwick

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