Some say Product Management; others believe it is a Software Development responsibility…
We believe that product usability is the responsibility of all departments and functions involved in the development process: Marketing, Sales, Software Development, QA, Help Desk and more.
In an ideal product and end user oriented organization, usability should be a core principle throughout all phases of the development cycle. This is a quick post to provide an overview of where various usability milestones should be injected into the definition, design, development and deployment of a given product or website.
Definition
In this early stage where requirements are being gathered, product management & marketing should take some time to better understand the target users, their environment and the subtleties of the interface requirements.
What are the gross categories of the target audience? This doesn’t necessarily fall simply into categories of user-role or demographic. More often than not, behavioral and environmental trends are what drive perceptions of whether something is usable, or useful. For example, people who work on their feet and are not necessarily at their desk for the full 8hrs of a given work day, will need larger visual cues for critical alerts or timely calls to action. This is typically the type of thing you will only catch if you conduct contextual interviews and user ethnography.
Design
During the design phase, it’s helpful to have your target audience and user types documented as personas. The persona documentation is a helpful reference tool for business and functional analysts charged with translating processes flows and functional requirements into system work-flow models and interface schematics.
More often than not, the phrase “That looks alright to me” is uttered among product managers and analysts without having a touchstone to vet the flows and schematics. Knowledge of the user personas, task models and use cases will always drive the design to a more solid state.
Even the best straw man work-flows and schematics can use some vetting – before moving into your development sprints, have the marketing and product team test out the design on paper with some sample users. Initial feedback on the mock-ups typically reveal insightful recommendations. Questions like “What would you expect to happen when you click here?” or “Why did you decide that’s what you needed to click?” will help you understand how they are perceiving the design and the information as you designed it.
Development
For whatever reason, UI designs often undergo a round of changes between leaving the hands of the UI designers and the final build. This is typical and usually can be attributed to technical, time or budgetary constraints.
Every now and then, changes are snuck in by engineers who have a feel for UI and have their own approach to design. For this reason, it’s helpful to document all of the flows and schematics, along with interactive states for all UI components. The documentation should be supplemented with the design rationale in order to maintain the integrity of the UI. This is particularly important for actionable design elements. If you don’t have a rationale for the design, you may want to rethink how it got into the schematic. As an added benefit, this helps to reducing developer’s time spent on interpreting designs and to remain focused on clean code.
Validation
Once development is complete and the product enters alpha/beta testing, A formal round of Usability Tests are essential and effective methods for benchmark data, validation of your designs and gauging readiness for market. Key concerns should be identified and addressed prior to release, or where appropriate they may be deferred and addressed during future product releases.
By keeping a fixed eye on the users and their interactions with the product, your organization will strengthen the vital bridge between usability issues and the software development view of the user interface.
Post Product Launch
Even after the product is released to market users will go through adoption and long-tail stages of use. Several rounds of usability testing will help gain the quantitative and qualitative user interaction feedback essential for success.
In gathering feedback from users and preparing for successful future product revisions and enhancements, your organization will ensure that the product has every opportunity to achieve the results required by your end users’ investment and trust.
-Jon Fukuda
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