Convergence 2003 Wellington – Te Papa, 29 April 2003 Easily Making IT Easy to Use Robert Biddle, James Noble Victoria University of Wellington

Convergence 2003 Wellington – Te Papa, 29 April 2003 What is Usability? Usability: the ease with which a user can learn to operate, prepare inputs for, and interpret outputs of a system or component. (IEEE) Aspects: learnability, predictability, … Factors: experience of user, frequency of use

Convergence 2003 Wellington – Te Papa, 29 April 2003 How Can We Determine Usability? Usability Inspection Cognitive Walkthroughs Heuristic Inspection Cognitive Dimensions Framework Usability Testing Usability Lab or In-Situ Think-Aloud or Co-Discovery Action and Reflection

Convergence 2003 Wellington – Te Papa, 29 April 2003 How Can We Design for Usability? Theories Affordance Theory, Activity Theory, … Techniques Task Analysis, Essential Modelling, … Processes User-Centred Design, Goal-Directed Design, Usage-Centred Design, …

Convergence 2003 Wellington – Te Papa, 29 April 2003 How does Usability work in the Wireless World? 1960s: The Lesson of Television McLuhan: Print is Cold, TV is Hot 1990s: The Lesson of the Web Nielsen: TV is Hot, the Web is Cool

Convergence 2003 Wellington – Te Papa, 29 April 2003

How does Usability work in the Wireless World? 2000+: The Lesson of… CellPhones? PDAs? WebPhones? WAP? GPRS? ?

Convergence 2003 Wellington – Te Papa, 29 April 2003

Recent Work at Victoria in Human-Computer Interaction Approach: Usage-Centred, Object-Oriented, Agile Technology Perl, CGI, Tcl/Tk, Java, JSP, WAP, GPRS, Work with Software Engineering Lightweight Collaborative Tools Learn from the Humanities Visual Corpus Analysis Semiotics of User Interface Design

Convergence 2003 Wellington – Te Papa, 29 April 2003 CASE tools on web pages Allow simple collaboration Usable anywhere with web access Browser independent Inspirations: Wiki, Hotmail BrowserForm HTML Web ServerDBMS Servlets Lightweight Collaborative Tools

Convergence 2003 Wellington – Te Papa, 29 April 2003 Lightweight Collaborative Tools: Ukase

Convergence 2003 Wellington – Te Papa, 29 April 2003 Seek: UML Sequence Diagrams (Rilla Khaled)

Convergence 2003 Wellington – Te Papa, 29 April 2003 NutCASE: UML Class Diagrams (Dan MacKay)

Convergence 2003 Wellington – Te Papa, 29 April 2003 Cliki: Custom Graphic Interaction (Donald Gordon)

Convergence 2003 Wellington – Te Papa, 29 April 2003 Lessons from Lightweight Collaborative Web Tools Focus on users and usage Focus on models and constraints Domain specific work is easier to understand Shared state feeds groupware Less is enough Less is more

Convergence 2003 Wellington – Te Papa, 29 April 2003 Excel Spreadsheet Corpus Analysis (Daniel Ballinger)

Convergence 2003 Wellington – Te Papa, 29 April 2003 Semiotics of UI Design (Pippin Barr) Iconic: Resemblance Indexical: Causality Symbolic

Convergence 2003 Wellington – Te Papa, 29 April 2003 Work in Progress Lightweight Wireless Collaboration Wireless Usability Evaluation Visual Interaction Analysis Software Semiotics

Convergence 2003 Wellington – Te Papa, 29 April 2003

Easily Making IT Easy to Use Robert Biddle, James Noble Victoria University of Wellington