We recently gave the final presentation to our customer(s) on our system Usability evaluation; customer(s) is notionally plural since we presented to all the different perspectives - users, managers, financial managers, developers, contractors, etc. This combination makes tailoring the presentation difficult, so we just stayed with our ‘center’: insights about the current system inspired by Cognitive Systems Engineering.
By this point, the customers were becoming familiar with our unusual point of view, and the resulting unusual insights. They had also raised their expectations of what would come of all this. Initially they expected ‘look and feel’ improvements…now they were demanding a truly more effective system, one that would dramatically impact the mission user’s success.
The report itself was quite extensive, over 140 pages, containing everything from improvements to menus to complete re-working of the display navigation scheme. Some of the highlights:
1. By functionally re-designing the workspace (the screen layout of the windows), a work-centered functional process model was imposed on the system. Users naturally saw an ordering (and more importantly the functional coupling) of the mission work. Indirectly, it also ‘pulled together’ features that had been sprinkled throughout the existing environment.
2. Individual windows were redesigned to ‘encapsulate’ the support for work decisions, resulting in a more ‘compact’ overall system. The number of independent windows was reduced approximately 8-fold.
3. The improvements in 1 and 2 together resulted in a system that was much easier to operate. By redesigning the tool to have much less ’system effort’ left more user energy for the ‘mission effort’. The customer(s) saw that immediately.
4. Additionally, the improvements in 1 and 2 together implicitly identified some critical ‘work gaps’ that weren’t supported by the existing system. We provided some interim, initial concepts to fill those voids.
By the end of the evaluation, we had actually identified the significant functional capabilities that had been lurking under the hood of the existing design. We actually became enthusiastic about their potential for mission support. Our recommendations represent some pretty significant rework of the interface software and some of the underlying processing and persistent storage of the systems. But the developers (and even the bill payers) were enthusiastic to produce the next version of the system with those enhancements.
From the initial request to “make it look better so users will accept it” grew an insightful, deep analysis of this system artifact, supporting real mission work, for real users - the essence of Woods’ Cognitive Systems Engineering Triad.
Stumble it!