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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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, …

5. 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
2000+: The Lesson of … CellPhones? PDAs? WebPhones? WAP? GPRS? ?

6. 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

7. Lightweight Collaborative Tools
CASE tools on web pages
Allow simple collaboration
Usable anywhere with web access
Browser independent
Inspirations: Wiki, Hotmail
Browser
Form
Web Server
DBMS
HTML
Servlets

8. Lightweight Collaborative Tools: Ukase

9. Seek: UML Sequence Diagrams (Rilla Khaled)

10. NutCASE: UML Class Diagrams (Dan MacKay)

11. Cliki: Custom Graphic Interaction (Donald Gordon)

12. 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

13. Excel Spreadsheet Corpus Analysis (Daniel Ballinger)

14. Semiotics of UI Design (Pippin Barr)
Iconic: Resemblance
Indexical: Causality
Symbolic

15. Work in Progress Lightweight Wireless Collaboration
Wireless Usability Evaluation
Visual Interaction Analysis
Software Semiotics