PuneTech

What: A 3-hour, free event for World Usability Day, and a 2-day, paid conference on usability engineering, both featuring the who’s who of Usability in Pune, and some experts from outside too.

When: World Usability Day event is from 3pm to 6pm on Nov 27th; The Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering is on Nov 27th and 28th, full day.

Where: Sumant Mulgaonkar Auditorium, ICC towers, 403-A, Senapati Bapat Road. Map.

Registration and fees: The World Usability Day event is free for all to attend, and no registration is required. The full conference fees are Rs. 3500 for professionals, Rs. 2000 for academics, and Rs. 500 for students. Details here.

Details - World Usability Day Event

A gathering of usability practitioners is organized with many participatory community events to encourage informal discussion, knowledge sharing and networking. Usability professionals, user experience designers, design teachers, IT professionals, managers, software developers, students etc. are welcome to attend.

This event will consist of the following:

Photo Essay Competition on ‘Usability in Transportation’

The participants of this competition are expected to highlight usability problems and difficulties faced by people using a series of photographs and apt description of possible solutions. The photographs have to be focusing on any of the usability problems pertaining to transportation in terms of design of vehicles, transportation systems, traffic signals, road signage systems and communication, journey booking systems, etc. It should also touch upon design, engineering, social, cultural and ergonomic issues related to transportation.

Jury members for Photo Essay Competition

Dr. Sanjay Tripathi, Senior Consultant (Usability), TechMahindra Ltd, Pune -Chairman
Bhakti Khandekar, Principal Designer-User Interface , Infosys Technologies, Pune -Member
Taral Kulkarni, Senior Usability Engineer, Persistent Systems Ltd., Pune -Member
Kedar Kadam, Usability Engineer , Persistent Systems Ltd., Pune -Member

Usability Quiz

It is going to be a fun quiz contest to test our know-how of usability. The quiz will cover questions related to web-usability, user centered design process, human factors, user experience design etc. The best answer for each question will be awarded! So come prepared for the Usability Quiz!

Quiz Coordinators

Ganesh Gaikwad, Principal Human Factors Engineer, Symantec, Pune
Atul Manohar, Lead User Experience Management Practice , Satyam Computer Services , Ltd. Pune
Nagesh Susarla, Manager / Principal UI Designer, Symantec Pune
Shashank Deshpande, Director , Clarice Technologies , Pune.

Panel Discussion on ‘Multi-disciplinary Perspectives of Usability’

Whose property is it anyway? Engineering, Design, Management, Psychology, Ergonomics ?
It is an interactive deliberation between panelists and participants to understand the difficulties faced by those who aspire to practice usability. Following panelists will represent different domain perspectives of usability.

Panel Moderator :
Dr. Dinesh Katre, Group Head- Human Centred Design and Computing, C-DAC, Pune

Panelists :
Dr. Pradeep Yammiyavar, DoD, IIT, Guwahati - Psychology
Dr. Neela Rajhans, Professor, College of Engineering, Pune -Ergonomics
Prof. Pradeep Pendse, Dean IT/Business Design , Welingkar Institute, Mumbai. -Management
Prof. Aniruddha Joshi , Associate Professor , IDC , IIT , Mumbai. -Design
Mr. Sameer Chabukswar, Head, Usability Engineering, Persistent Systems Ltd. Pune -Engineering

Details - Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering

Normally, we at PuneTech do not feature information about paid workshops, trainings, or conferences. But every once in a while, an event comes along which appear to have exceptional technical content, which in our subjective opinion makes it worth the money. The Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering, 2008, hosted by Vishwakarma Institute of Information Technology, is one such event, where the impressive list of speakers, and the detailed schedule makes us feel that this could be a good event to attend. (Please note: PuneTech is a purely non-commercial website and does not take any considerations (monetary or otherwise) for any of the content on the site. Decision to feature content on the site is made by the editors purely on the basis of interestingness and technical content.)

Broad themes of the conference:

Offshore Usability
Cross-cultural aspects, remote usability methods and tools, challenges in user requirements research, etc.

Usability to Bridge the Digital Divide
Designing ICT products and applications for rural users, such as e-governance, e-learning, localization of user interface.

Usability Engineering
Institutionalisation, processes & practices, multidisciplinary dimensions, best usability practice, impact of adaptation of user centred design approach in SDLC process and project management, agile process, interaction design and client architecture, internationalisation of user interface, etc.

User Experience Design for New Media
Web, Mobile, PDA, Touch-screen, new interaction models, interaction design for development, etc.

User Experience Research
Tying user experience to strategic business innovation objectives, UX methods and research approaches for emerging markets with unique technology adoption curves, user experience innovations for Indian consumer and enterprise products, next generation user-driven technologies, etc.

Multidisciplinary Challenges of HCI in Education
Fusion of diverse disciplines in the syllabus of Human-Computer Interaction, user experience design thinking into the design / engineering / management curriculum, etc.

If you are not familiar with Usability, or not convinced as to why it is such a vitally important field of study, check out past PuneTech articles on usability.

Update: Here is Aman King’s article on this event.

What:Geek Night - ThoughtWorks Pune is proud to host Abhijit Thosar - Usability Guru
Date/Time: Saturday, September 20, 2pm - 4pm
Venue: GF-01 & MZ-01, Tower C, Panchshil Tech Park, Yerwada, Pune Pune, Maharashtra 411006
Registration: This event is free for all, but please register here

About the Speaker - Abhijit Thosar

Abhijit has over 20 years experience in the design and development of products based on emerging technologies. He joined Human Factors International, India in 2000 and worked as a project director on over 50 usability projects for clients across domains. Abhijit now works for Capgemini Pune. His other interests include designing accessible systems and interfaces for members of the elderly and disabled population as well as designing research for products and services for upcoming markets. Abhijit is looking forward to an interactive session where he wants to share case studies from his experience.

About Geek Night:

As some of you may know, we at ThoughtWorks have been organizing something called a ‘Geek Night’ for some time now. A Geek Night is an informal gathering where we pick a hot technology topic and proceed to discuss it and learn from each others’ experience and perspectives. The meeting takes about two hours inclusive of eating/drinking (soft drinks only *wink*) and heckling the presenters. We generally plan it on Saturday evenings so that our peers from other organizations can join us too.

The topics for these Geek Nights may range from cutting-edge technologies like JRuby to proven open source tools like Hibernate or Spring. And sometimes we indulge in Code Jams where we get our laptops in the room and go about solving a problem and discuss our solutions till the food is over.

<h3>Related Articles</h3>

• Designing for Usability - by Manas Garg
• Liveblogging Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting on Usability

(Manas Garg, who had organized the recent POCC meeting on Usability, was inspired to write this article after attending that session.)

About the author: Manas is interested in a variety of things like psychology, philosophy, sociology, photography, movie making etc. But since there are only 24 hours in a day and most of it goes in sleeping and earning a living, he amuses himself by writing software, reading a bit and sharing his thoughts.

Ultimately, we build all the systems so that they are used at one point of time, and the system that we build will be used only if they are usable. If a system is not usable, how will someone use it?

It is very common to come across doors that are supposed to be pushed to open (and there is a sticker close to the handle bar which says PUSH) but most of the people will pull it. Also, it is very common to see doors that are supposed to be pulled but people end up pushing them. It’s not really a problem with the people. It’s a problem with the design of the door. It’s a usability issue. There are doors that are pushed when they are expected to be pushed. It’s all in the design, isn’t it?

When Gmail was launched, it was an instant hit. Even though it didn’t do as many things as other email services did at that point of time (like support for all browsers, drafts etc) but it was still a revolution by itself. And the reason was simple - usability. What was the need of Gnome project? Wasn’t it the usability of GNU/Linux for non-programmers?

Two levels of system usability

1. Conceptual usability

A system is not an island. It is connected with various other entities by various means. And it shares one relationship or the other with those entities. A conceptual model effectively captures these various entities and what kind of relationship our system has with these external entities.

The model of Britanica Encyclopedia is that a group of experts together create an encyclopedia over important topics which can then be read by people. The model of Wikipedia is that people (and that includes everyone in the world) can help in writing the encyclopedia that everyone can read. The model of Google Knol is that experts can write articles on specific subjects which everyone can read. The readers can suggest improvements that the original authors can incorporate.

The conceptual model must be made usable. The entire system will eventually be built on top of the conceptual model.

2. Interface usability

So, we have settled that a system maintains some relationships with some external entities. This relationship is exposed through interfaces and we need to think through the usability of those interfaces.

Gmail is an excellent example of interface usability. As I mentioned earlier, there were several email services when Gmail was introduced but its interface usability was far superior. This is an example of how the same conceptual model can be presented to the user with completely different interfaces.

The conceptual usability is a must to help the user understand the system. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia which can be read and modified by anyone. And interface usability is a must to help the user *do* something with the system. On each page of Wikipedia, everywhere your eye goes, you’ll find a link to edit the page or a section thereof. It almost invites you to modify the page.

Methodology and Evaluation

There are ways/methodologies to design usable systems. The usable systems are still created by people whose thought process naturally evaluates the usability at every step. However, these methods can make the system designer better grounded in the real world and make him/her more efficient too.

Much like a system cannot be declared as functional till it is tested for the same, usability of the system has to be tested with equal vigor. After all, if the system is not usable, who is going to use it (even if it is functional)? And there is only one way to test the usability of the system - by letting target users use it and that too without providing any guidance. Closely observing the users can be an eye opener many times.

And the system designer/developer cannot verify the system usability. In the course of developing, the developer has learnt too much about the system and knows exactly how it works. However, the user would not have so much of knowledge about the system and may not attempt to do things in the same ways. If you don’t believe me, go and re-read the doors example.

And what else?

And first thing is still the last thing. We need to create usable systems because nobody uses unusable systems. And very few systems are usable by accident. Most of the usable systems are developed with usability as a focus.

Further reading

• Overview of Usability from Jakob Nielsen
• Wikipedia entry of Usability
• US Government guidelines on usability
• Basic usability guidelines from Yale
• POCC meeting on Usability - PuneTech liveblog
• Aman King’s article on Usability event - Geek Night at ThoughtWorks

I’m liveblogging the Pune OpenCoffee Club meeting on usability. About 30 people in the room now. These are quick-n-dirty notes, not really well structured. Hopefully in a couple of days, more coherent reports will emerge from me or other bloggers. For background on some of the speakers, see the meeting announcement page on punetech.

Jhumkee: This field started around World War-II. Aircraft accidents. Instead of saying that pilots are idiots, the engineers decided to change the design so that mistakes don’t happen. Instead of engineers designing a system by themselves, involve the users in the process. Don’t just think about what they want. Instead, ask them. Or watch them using the product.

Military, aerospace, and other fields really embraced this field. In India, this is a fairly new field. Especially in IT.

But it is common sense.

Shashank: In the era of electronics and IT, it is very easy to put in new features. This is a problem. In general, in most product companies, engineers first create a product, and then go around looking for users who are interested in that product.

But adding features, normally results in reducing usability. So, especially for small startups, there is a choice to make - add features or add usability?

Harrshada: How did you start your startup? Did you find a need and try to fill it, or did you have a cool technology/algorithm that you wanted to implement? Usability says that you should always have a target audience in mind, and work towards solving their problems. Your technology is not the important part. Constantly be in touch with users and keep observing them.

It’s rather trivial to say that we should keep users in mind when designing the product. But, how to actually go about this?

Jhumkee: You must get a real user, and then there are a number of techniques that are used to get information out of the user. First of all: You are not a user. Many designers of systems are under the impression that they are a user. Because, they are actually using their own product. In fact, Steve Yegge argues passionately that you should only build products that you yourself want. But, the problem is that as you are designing the system you become an expert. You know everything about the system. You are not a regular user. Hence, you must spend time with real users.

Shashank: There is a science behind this. There are a bunch of techniques for doing this. Some of them are obvious, and some hidden means by which you can get usability information out of users. You need to think through this process. But it doesn’t have to be anything very fancy. Interview your users. Ask open ended questions about what they were trying to achieve, what they felt, what made them happy, and what frustrated them. Use this to determine some broad areas of concern, and then start digging deeper.

Jhumkee: There is no silver-bullet here. Some of this comes from experience. A lot of this differs based on the But there are some broad guidelines. It must be an iterative process. Make changes. Test with real users. Repeat.

There are a lot of guidelines on individual things (e.g. font sizes, navigation architecture, accessibility factors) etc. But you can’t simply apply them without a deeper understanding. Because usability is a holistic thing. Even if the parts are all OK, the whole system might still not be very usable.

But, the guidelines are a good starting point. There are some good basic guidelines at Yale. And also at usability.gov.

RouteGuru: Usability is a huge issue for us. How to present information about an entire route in SMS form, and how to do this in a way that the route gets built up in their head. Another big hassle is the 80-20 problem. The last mile is significantly more complicated than the rest of the directions. Also, some users are only interested in the last mile, as they know how to get to the general vicinity. Others want all the directions. We are still grappling with this issue.

Somebody I don’t know: For usability, keep only one action per page. One page should be for one purpose only (except for the home page). If there is a form, there should be only one button. Use a tool from google that is used to serve two layouts of the same page to different users and then study their behavior. Use this information to decide what works and what doesn’t.

Shashank: This last technique is a very quantitative mechanism. Analytics, heat-maps, etc. give you a lot of data. You don’t always know how to use this data. The world is moving towards qualitative analysis.

Manas: Users don’t always know what they want. So how do you handle this?

Jhumkee: What you do is task-based analysis. Find out what the users want to do, and then figure out how long it takes them to do it, and whether they get frustrated doing it, and whether they are successful or not. This will give you good insights. So the real work is in figuring out what these tasks should be.

Unfortunately, I had to leave the meeting at this stage to get back to my kids. Hopefully I’ll be able to fill in the gaps with notes taken by someone else.

What: Pune OpenCoffee Club get-together. Informal meeting to discuss UI, usability etc.

When: Saturday, 23 August, 5pm

Where: SICSR, Model Colony. Here is the map.

Registration and Fees: This event is free for everyone, but you must register by sending an e-mail to manasgarg at NOSPAM gmail dot com

Details:

The general agenda is to have a free-wheeling discussion on various aspects of UI development including (of course not limited to) tools/methodologies for quick prototyping, usability aspects etc. Jhumkee Iyengar, Shashank Deshpande, and Harrshada Deshpande (with a combined experience of 40+ years in design and usability) have graciously agreed to be present to guide the discussion.

Jhumkee Iyengar has been doing design and usability since 1988, in IT, manufacturing and other industries, most recently in Persistent Systems, where she created and grew the usability group. She also launched usability in e-Governance and is responsible for improvements in PMC’s websites. She is also a presenter for the Nielsen Norman Group, and conducts usability workshops all over the world.

For more details about Jhumkee, see her linked-in profile.

Shashank Deshpande Shashank has been in the field of IT usability for 15+ years (yes, he has been doing usability since before it became a known/popular field in India). He was the head of usability at Symantec India (formerly Veritas) for 9 years. Just this week, he is returning from conducting a 4-day workshop on usability at Yahoo! India. For more information about Shashank, see his linked-in profile.

Harrshada Desphande (not related to Shashank!) has also agreed to be present to guide the discussion. Harrshada has 9 years of experience in managing user experience design in the IT industry - most recently in SAS R&D. She also organized the hugely successful IdeaCamp Pune.

For more information about Harrshada, see her linked-in profile

We are hoping to get another couple of experts in this field. I’ll post that info as soon as we have confirmations. Stay tuned.

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