SPSS Redesigned By Helen Cheevers

What is SPSS? SPSS was originally the “Statistical Package for Social Sciences” but due to its use over all academic disciplines now it’s just referred to as SPSS (they never changed the initials). It is a piece of software used to analyse data for researchers to save on the time involved with doing it by hand.

Why I chose SPSS to redesign From listening to people in my course, people in other courses, lecturers and even using it myself I’ve learned that SPSS is probably the most unfriendly and convoluted piece of software ever made.

The problems with SPSS Nielson & Molich (1990) listed 10 Usability Heuristics and SPSS breaks every single one of them. In the slides below I’ll list them and explain how each principle has been violated.

The 10 Heuristics Visibility of System Match between System & Real World User Control & Freedom Consistency & Standards Error Prevention Recognition rather than Recall Flexibility & Efficiency Aesthetic & Minimalist design Help users see & prevent errors Help & Documentation

The Redesign As you can see from the prototype there is a lot less text, it is more intuitive and easy to use and doesn’t hinder learning experience or the like. I’m just going to go over a few edits to the program that would be in a full design but were not included in the prototype.

Tab Organisation The options are divided into tabs by complexity and type. The first statistics tab is preliminary – for novice and unacademic users. The second and third are for mediocre users (us!), separated into compare groups (studies with an IV) and relationship analysis (studies without an IV) The last tabs are the advanced statistics and utilities tabs for advanced users (to separate unessential options) The help tab is at the end.

Help Menu In the help menu I would be including a glossary of important terms in statistics and how they appear in SPSS. There would also be a small overview of statistics and the different types of analyses as well as a Q&A to help users figure out what statistic they need to use and how to do it.

Intuitive Icons Rather than having dropdown lists full of options I opted to have icons or clickable text within the tabs to navigate and find what is needed. All the icons I would use (and have used) would be intuitive to the user and relate to the real world.

Advanced Options These I removed from the bulk of the program and moved to a separate section. The advanced and primarily unused analyses would be put to one side to prevent cluttering up the users workload, and all the advanced utilities are also to one side. Any advanced options within the statistics would either be hidden or put to one side, with an option to turn them off or on (like syntax reader or the likes)

User Feedback The users I tested had a broad range of understanding, from novice to mediocre. I could not find any advanced users so a lot of my decisions were based on the novice and mediocre users. A lot of them seemed happy with the redesign, except they still thought that it was lacking aesthetically. They felt the new interface was easier to use and navigate though, and would be happier with this redesign of the software.

Overall I found this assignment the most difficult to date as even though I was familiar with the prototyping tool I used and had experience with SPSS, I still have problems with SPSS and found it difficult to conceptualise the problems and address them. If I were to do this assignment over I would have spent more time on the graphics and found some advanced users to test.