Member
Looks at Products From Outside In
By Michael
Abrams
Just as a
steering wheel makes a complicated piece of machinery manageable, a well-designed
user interface can make a powerful application easier to use. Too bad
that the reverse also is true. For evidence you could look at a CAT scan
of my spine. On it, you will notice numerous disks popped while trying
to tease out the secrets of purportedly "intuitive" software.
Now hear
the good news from Deypika Singh. You have probably met her at
one of our chapter meetings, where she has been staffing the library with
Lynn Sornson.
Deypika is
an evangelist for a new field. She is a specialist in usability.
"Usability"
is an awful sounding word, but it's a very lovely concept. It boils down
to looking at products from the user's point of view, taking an outside-in
approach, if you will. By setting up studies and watching how users interact
with a product, changes are identified. Moving a few buttons, expanding
labels to provide better contextual cues, are examples of things that
can make it easier for end users to navigate through an interface, setting
off a happy cascade: customer satisfaction, fewer tech-support calls,
lower costs, and the accumulation of good will.
"There
are very few jobs where you can benefit the company and the customer at
the same time," she says. Deypika (which rhymes with the Spanish
word típica) notes that usability's benefits are potentially
pervasive because the quality of much of our everyday experiences is framed
by technology's many faces.
Deypika was
born in India near Delhi. She came to the United States when she was 11
years old. Her father, who has a Ph.D. in environmental studies, was a
professor at UC Riverside, and her mother, who has a Ph.D. in home economics,
worked for the county. Six years ago the family moved to Point Loma when
Deypika's mom and dad decided to go into business for themselves.
After high
school, Deypika enrolled in UCSD, intending to go onto medical school.
But then she was attracted to cognitive science or the study of how people
process information. This cross-discipline is developing at the overlaps
of psychology, neurology, and the artificial-intelligence niche of computer
science. In the cognitive science lab, Deypika began participating in
running usability studies. By the time she was graduated last year, she
was a believer in usability's widespread applicability and knew that she
wanted to do it for a living.
She joined
SandCHI, the local chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery's
Special Interest Group for Computer-Human Interaction, and showed up at
last October's STC-San Diego Chapter meeting for SandCHI's presentation.
At the following month's STC meeting, she met eHelp Corporation's Silke
Fleischer, who gave a presentation on RoboHelp.
eHelp had
conducted usability studies in the past, but they had never been carried
out by an expert. Deypika agreed to conduct a two-week pilot study of
RoboDemo, an eHelp authoring tool for online training materials. Three
months later, the two weeks has yet to run out. Managers of other eHelp
products want her to conduct studies for them.
All this provides evidence for two indisputable facts:
- It pays to show up at STC chapter meetings.
- This is the dawning of the age of usability.
