Making Usability Recommendations Useful and Usable

by , ,

Peer-reviewed Article

pp. 162-179

No PDF available for download.

Abstract

This paper evaluates the quality of recommendations for improving a user interface resulting from a usability evaluation. The study compares usability comments written by different authors, but describing similar usability issues. The usability comments were provided by 17 professional teams who independently evaluated the usability of the website for the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. The study finds that only 14 of the 84 studied comments (17%) addressing six usability problems contained recommendations that were both useful and usable. Fourteen recommendations were not useful at all. Sixteen recommendations were not usable at all. Quality problems include recommendations that are vague or not actionable, and ones that may not improve the overall usability of the application. The paper suggests characteristics for “useful and usable recommendations,” that is, recommendations for solving usability problems that lead to changes that efficiently improve the usability of a product.

Practitioner’s Take Away

Do as you preach. Show a good example by making your usability recommendations useful and usable.

  • Communicate each recommendation clearly at the conceptual level.
  • Ensure that the recommendation improves the overall usability of the application.
  • Be aware of the business or technical constraints.
  • Show respect for the product team’s constraints.
  • Solve the whole problem, not just a special case.
  • Make recommendations specific and clear.
  • Avoid vagueness by including specific examples in your recommendations.

Published in: in Volume 2, Issue 4,

The Authors

  • Rolf Molich

    Mr. Molich manages DialogDesign, a small Danish usability consultancy. He conceived and coordinated the Comparative Usability Evaluation (CUE) studies where more than 140 usability professionals evaluated the same applications. He is the co-inventor of the heuristic inspection method (with Jakob Nielsen). He received the UXPA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014.

  • Robin Jeffries

    Robin Jeffries is currently User Experience Lead at Google, where she works to better understand the broad spectrum of Google users and to adapt usability techniques to new application paradigms. Prior to that, she was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where she worked in the CTO's office bringing attention to users and user experience across the company. She has been a researcher at Hewlett- Packard Laboratories, Carnegie-Mellon University, and the University of Colorado. One thread of her research has focused on comparing usability methods as used by practitioners and improving various aspects of usability methodologies.

  • Joe Dumas

    Dr. Joseph Dumas is a nationally recognized leader in the human-computer interaction profession and is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Usability Studies. He is the author of three books: Designing User Interfaces for Software (1988), A Practical Guide to Usability Testing (1993; 1999) with Ginny Redish, and Moderating Usability Tests: Principles & Practices for Interacting (2008) with Beth Loring. He has published dozens of papers in the popular and research literature, including a chapter on Usability Testing for three editions of the Human-Computer Interaction Handbook. He has held positions in industry - for Oracle Corporation and academia - for Bentley University where he taught in its graduate Human Factors program. He is currently consulting with Oracle on strategic projects. He received his PhD. in Cognitive Psychology from State University of New York at Buffalo.