Usability more human kind than ever

 By Clare Mitchell Crow

Since 2001, our organisation has evolved rapidly and continually in order to stay one step ahead of technology and consumer trends – we have evolved over this short span of time from focusing on usability, to the overall customer experience. Over decades the discipline has transformed from a fundamental attempt to understand how humans might interact better with mechanics, to a technologically advanced collection of processes and services developed to improve all facets of the customer experience.

Usability, as we know it, first emerged in the UK as a result of the intensive use of technology during the Second World War. People realised that adapting machines to meet the needs of humans, improved human-machine reactions, speed and performance. The science expanded into telecommunications, then computers, and the rest is quite literally history. All the digital technology we now take for granted was developed and refined as a result of pioneering usability testing.

Of course the analytical consultancy, research services, customer insight and experience management expertise we draw upon today didn’t leap directly from wartime mechanics. Studies of human-computer interaction (HCI) and other behavioural sciences led to a major focus on user-centered design in the 1980s and 90s. Consultants began to realise the importance of encouraging end users of products to participate in the design process, rather than simply being shown a range of finished designs for comment. A discipline with its roots in the military and academia had to realise that revenue-driven businesses rarely had the time for blank canvasses, blue-sky thinking and constant design revisions – they needed user centered design to drive mutually pleasing results as quickly as possible.

Customer experience consultancy as we know it today evolved directly for this realisation. Bringing the story right up to date, even the very latest ISO standard for human-centric design is now demanding a far greater emphasis on human involvement.

The revised version of the human-centered design standard ISO 13407, renamed ISO 9241-210, is now out for public comment until April. Its aim is to ensure interactive systems have usability at the heart of their design. The critical change to the standard is that the four key human-centered design activities are now requirements, not merely recommendations. As pointed out on Econsultancy.com, anybody claiming that a product or service adheres to the standard must now:

• Understand and specify the context of use (including users, tasks, environments)
• Specify the user requirements in sufficient detail to drive the design
• Produce design solutions which meet these requirements
• Conduct user-centered evaluations of these design solutions and modify the design taking account of the results

Essentially then, the new standard means organisations and ultimately their developers must have humans heavily involved in design evaluation to get the tick. It also emphasises the role of iteration in design and that humans should be consulted throughout the design process, not simply in testing results. We have to consider not just how we test, but when we test, and who we test with.

The practice of evaluating and refining usability has evolved considerably since we first made the transition away from surmounting mechanical obstacles and functionality issues and began instead to look more closely at the user, or customer. A more acute emphasis on the people who actually use the products and services we test, has led to us taking a more holistic view of interactions, interfaces and the entire experience.

That is why the many elements of a modern customer experience consultancy add up to so much more than just usability testing. The reason we employ innovative research techniques such as eye tracking or Electroencephalography (EEG) alongside tried and tested methodologies such as card sorting or ethnography, is because ultimately we want to provide the most valuable insights possible for the companies that ask us to help to make their customers happy.