I recently read an article concerning product usability. In that article (sorry, don’t have a link) it discussed studies of different products and how people reacted while using the product. For example, on a gas pump, before you could pump your gas you had to key in your zip code and press enter. The only problem was that the instructions never mentioned that you had to press enter, so, people would key in their zip code several times without hitting enter, get frustrated and leave without getting the gas that they initially pulled into the station for. In that article, it also spoke of the things to look at when creating a new product. Is it easy to use? Does it cause frustration or stress? Does it work the way you would expect it to work without carefully reading the instructions?

After some thought I came to the conclusion that we should be using these same theories and concepts when developing our applications. On an application I inherited, I had the opportunity to watch some of the users complete the main form of the application. This is an application that runs locally as when the user fills the form out they are usually in a place with no network coverage, once they complete this form they connect their blackberry to a tablet pc, connect to the corporate network and replicate their changes.

The problem with the form is that there is a button that says “Send Assessment”, now once the user completes the form they instictively click this button thinking it will send the form to the server. Not so, and this ends up being a point of frustration for the user. The fact is that the “Send Assessment” button doesn’t do anything except run validation routines and save the form. Also, clicking the save button does the exact same thing. So, why
the two different ways of doing the same thing with one way being a source of frustration for the user? Some suggested that clicking the “Send Assessment” button should also replicate. The problem with this is that the user’s blackberry isn’t currently connected, so it would not replicate and cause errors along with more frustration and probably anger. After some discussion this “Send Assessment” button will be going away. It’s existence is impracticle and a source of frustration for the users.

But back to the product usability stuff I started with… I think we as developers are sometimes isolated from actually watching users use our applications. When we are testing our own applications we are biased, we check the functionality that we have just been working on and this leads us to miss things that would stand out to a normal user. As with product usability a lot of testing and research go into getting a product to market to ensure that it has the best chance possible to succeed. I think we need to do what we’ve been doing when testing an application plus actually WATCH people use our application to judge their reactions, how they think it should work, how using the application makes them feel, not just the basic functionality, which will have an effect on the previously listed items. I think following these types of guidelines will help us make better user interfaces and applications that work more intuitivley (sp?) and not just the way we as Lotus professionals have gotten used to Lotus applications looking, feeling and working and have come to the conclusion, or bad habit, that that’s just the way a Lotus application works.

Keith