Usability engineering nielsen pdf

The book provides the tools needed to avoid usability surprises and improve product quality. Step-by-step information on which method to use at various stages during the development lifecycle are included, along with detailed information on how to run a usability test and the unique issues relating to international usability. Add to cart. Jakob Nielsen. Java With a lot of Programming examples Key Featuresa- Covers the key concepts of Java Programminga- Programming examples are provided to understand the concepts wella- Designed to cover the syllabus ….

Solutions to all Exercises in Let Us Python, Cross-check Your Solutions Key Featuresa- Strengthens the foundations, as detailed explanation of programming language concepts are given in simple …. Figures, Tables, and Topics from this paper. Usability engineering Iterative design New product development Software project management Usability testing Iterative method. Citation Type. Has PDF. Publication Type. More Filters. Towards improving user interfaces: A proposal for integrating functionality and usability since early phases.

View 1 excerpt, cites background. Drivers of usability in product design practice: Induction of a framework through a case study of three product development projects. Design Studies. Systematic evaluation of design choices for software development tools. Concepts Tools. View 1 excerpt, cites methods. Highly Influenced. The trade-off between learnability for novice users and efficiency of use for expert users can sometimes be resolved to the benefit of both user groups without employing dual interaction styles.

The expert users would not be hurt by such a concession to the novices. Even so, it is not always possible to achieve optimal scores for all usability attributes simultaneously. Trade-offs are inherent in any design process and apply no less to user interface design.

For example, the desire to avoid catastrophic errors may lead to the decision to design a user interface that is less efficient to use than otherwise possible: typically because extra questions are asked to assure that the user is certain about wanting a particular action. In cases where a usability trade-off seems necessary, attempts should first be made at finding a win-win solution that can satisfy both requirements.

If that is not possible, the dilemma should be resolved under the directions set out by the project's usability goals see page 79 , which should define which usability attributes are the most important given the specific circumstances of the project. Furthermore, considerations other than usability may lead to designs violating some usability principles. For example, security considerations often require access controls that are decidedly non- user friendly, such as not providing constructive error messages in case of an erroneously entered password.

As another example, museum information systems and other publicly used systems may have hidden options, such as a command to reboot the system 5. Actually, Fitts' Law implies that it would be a little slower to move the mouse between fields in the larger version of the dialog box, since the time to point at an object is proportional to the logarithm of the distance to the object [Card et at.

However, expert users would be likely to move between the fields in the dialog box with the Tab key another accelerator if speed was of the essence, and they would therefore not be subject to Fitts' Law. An analysis of 92 published comparisons of usability of hypertext systems found that 4 of the 10 largest effects including all of the top 3 effects in the studies were due to individual differences between users and that 2 were due to task differences [Nielsen d].

It is therefore an important aspect of usability engineering to know the user. Understanding the major ways of classifying users may also help [Potosnak et ai. Figure 3 shows the "user cube" of the three main dimensions6 along which users' experience differs: experience with the system, with computers in general, and with the task domain. The users' experience with the specific user interface under consid- eration is the dimension that is normally referred to when discussing user expertise, and users are normally considered to be either novices or experts, or somewhere in-between.

The transition from novice to expert user of a system often follows a learning curve somewhat like those shown in Figure 2. Most of the usability principles discussed in this book will help make systems easier to learn, and thus allow users to reach expert status faster. In addition to general learnability, there are several 6.

Note that the classification dimensions used here are different from those used in the "user cube" of Cotterman and Kumar []. Their dimensions concerned the degree to which the user was the producer or consumer of information, whether the user had any part in developing the system, and the user's degree of decision-making authority over the system.

These dimensions are certainly also of interest. A classic example is the way many menu systems list the appropriate shortcut for menu options aspart of the menu itself. Such shortcuts are often function keys or command name abbreviations but, in any case, they can be mentioned in a way that does not hurt novice users while still encouraging them to try the alternative interaction technique.

Online help systems may encourage users to broaden their understanding of a system by providing hypertext links to information that is related to their specific queries. It may even be possible for the system to analyze the user's actions and suggest alternative and better ways of achieving the same goal. Some user interfaces are only intended to be used by novices, in that almost nobody will use them more than a few times.

Most interfaces, however, are intended for both novice and expert users and thus need to accommodate both usage styles. As discussed in Section 2. Several widely used systems come with two sets of menus, one for novice users often called "short menus" to avoid any stigma and one for expert users "long menus". This allows the system to offer a wide range of features to the experts without confusing the novices.

Similarly, as discussed in Section 5. Interfaces that are solely intended for novices may not need special help systems, as they should include all the necessary user assis- tance in the primary interface itself.

In spite of the common simplistic distinction between expert and novice users, the reality is that most people do not acquire compre- hensive expertise in all parts of a system, no matter how much they use it. Almost all systems of some complexity have so many features and so many uses that any given user only makes exten- sive use of a small subset [Draper ].

Thus, even an "expert" user may be quite novice with respect to many parts of the system not normally used by that user.

As a consequence, expert users still need access to help systems for those parts of the interface that they do not use as often, and they will benefit from increased learn- ability of these features.

The users' general experience with computers also has impact on user interface design. As a simple example, consider a utility program distributed to mainframe systems administrators as compared with one that is to be used by home computer owners. Even with more application-oriented interfaces, users with extensive experience from many other applications will normally be better off than users who have only used a single system, since experienced users will have some idea of what features to look for and how a computer normally deals with various situations.

For example, a user with experience of a spread- sheet and a database program might try to look for a "sort" command in a new word processor. Furthermore, a user's programming experience will to a large degree determine the extent to which that user can use macro languages and other complex means of combining commands, and whether the resulting structures will be easily maintainable and modifiable when the user's needs change at a later date. The final important dimension is the user's knowledge of the task domain addressed by the system.

Interfaces for users with exten- sive domain knowledge can use specialized terminology and a higher density of information in the screen designs. Users with little domain knowledge will need to have the system explain what it is doing and what the different options mean, and the termi- nology used should not be as abbreviated and dense as for domain specialists. Consider, for example, the design of a financial plan- ning system.

Users also differ in other ways than experience. Some differenti- ating factors are easy to observe, like age [Czaja ] and gender [Fowler and Murray ; Teasley et al. Other factors are less immediately obvious, like differences in spatial memory and reasoning abilities [Gomez et al. The important lesson from studies of these and other differ- ences is that one needs to consider the entire spectrum of intended users and make sure that the interface is usable for as many as possible, and not just for those who happen to have the same char- acteristics as the developers themselves.

In addition to differences between groups of users, there are also important differences between individual users [Egan ]. The most extreme example may be in programming, where the differ- ence in productivity between the best and the worst programmers typically is a factor of 20 [Curtis ]. That is, the program that one person can write in two weeks will take another a year-and the two-week program will often be of better quality.

A practical implication of this result that has been found in several studies is that the most important aspect of improving software projects is to employ fewer, but better programmers. Even for nonprogramming tasks, the ratio between the best and the worst users' performance is typically a factor of between 4 and Since the ratio between best and worst users reflects the extremes and also depends on the number of users tested, one also commonly uses quartile ratios to express the magnitude of indi- vidual differences.

Quartiles divide a sorted range of observations, such as a set of user performance data, into four equally large sets. For example, assume that 8 users had been measured as having task throughputs of 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, and 9 transactions per minute. Since there are 8 users, the bottom quartile will cut between the second worst and third worst users, or a level of 3. Similarly, the top quartile will cut between the second best and 7. The reason Q3 is used to represent the performance of top users even though they are the fourth quartile is that Q3 is the level separating the third and the fourth quartile.

It would not be as representative to use Q4 which is the other endpoint of the interval representing the top quartile, since 04 is the performance achieved by the single-best user. Attitude differences can also impact how people use computers. For whatever reason, some people simply love using computers and will go to extreme efforts to learn all about their system.

I once interviewed a business professional who said that she liked to learn a new software package every month just to stay in shape, and many other "super-users" spend as much time as many hackers learning about obscure details in their computers, even though they are business professionals and not programmers [Nielsen et aI.

Such super-users also known as "power users" or "gurus" often serve an important function as liaisons between the regular users and new computer developments as introduced by an information management department or outside software vendors. The super-users' role as technology champions not only helps introduce new systems, but also provides the regular users with a local means of finding sympathetic and task- specific help [Gantt and Nardi ; Nardi and Miller ].

Since they often like to talk, super-users can also serve as a way for soft- ware developers to get feedback about changing user needs before the majority of users have reached a stage where these new needs have become apparent. Just remember that most users will be different from the super-users, so do not design the user interface purely on the basis of their desires. Given the many differences between groups of users and between individual users, it might be tempting to give up and just allow the users to customize their interfaces to suit their individual prefer- ences.

However, as discussed under the heading Users Are Not Designers on page 12, it is not a good idea to go too far in that direc- tion either. Most often, it is possible to design user interfaces to accommodate several kinds of users as long as attention is paid to all of the relevant groups during the design process.

It is rare that an interface change that is necessary to help one group will be a major problem for another, or that it is at least not possible to work around the second group's difficulties.

People have mostly been too busy building interfaces to worry where they came from, even though a few historical treatments are starting to emerge [Anonymous ; Card and Moran ; Gaines ; Gaines and Shaw a and b; Goldberg ; Grudin a; Nielsen a, Chapter 3; Nyce and Kahn ; Perry and Voelcker ; Rheingold ; Teitelman ].

See also [Ramsey and Grimes ] for a survey of early research in the user interface field. In the computer field, the term "generation" is often used to refer to the changes in the underlying hardware component technology. However, user interface technology has also been through a series of generations that roughly parallels the generations of hardware [Tesler ], and there are also other elements of the history of computing that have seen considerable change, such as the catego- ries of people using the computers.

Table 5 summarizes the genera- tions of computers and user interfaces so far. The summary of the advertising image of computers is based on [Aspray and Beaver ]. The dates given for each generation in Table 5 indicate the time from when early adapters started using that generation to the time when they started using the next. Only Experts, Computer as Programming, machine but guage Pioneer short mean time used in the com- pioneers calculator Batch for a limited between failures puter center time only 2 Transistors; Batch central- more reliable.

Remote edge e. Desktop dows, Icons, personal com- professionals, ductivity com- buy their own per- guages, workstations, Menus, and a Modern puters hobbyists puter as tool sonal computer spreadsheets heavy portables Pointing device 5 Wafer-scale Networked Nonimperative, "Dynabook," rnul- integration. G e n e ra tio n s o f U s e r In te rfa c e s earlier, and many innovation laggards stayed safely a generation or so behind the early adapters. The historical development of user interfaces is interesting because each generation seems to contain the previous ones as special cases.

Even as communication bandwidth has grown, previous communication methods remain useful, and the addition of new user populations does not mean that the previous users disappear. Many other technological developments involve the replacement of older technology with newer inventions, but a good designer of modern user interfaces still needs to know how to best use interac- tion techniques from several generations ago. Batch systems can be said to involve zero-dimensional interfaces in that the interaction between the system and the user was restricted to a single point in time: the submission of the batch job as a single unit.

All the user's commands had to be specified before the result of any of them was made known to the user. Obviously, this "inter- action style" was not highly usable for most purposes. Batch jobs did have an advantage in being able to run without user supervision in cases where the same thing had to be done over and over again, such as the archetypal case of payroll processing. Therefore, many modern computers have retained some form of batch capability to supplement their interactive mode.

It is very frustrating to have a long computation run almost to the end only to have to be discarded because the last command should have been modified. Batch interfaces have enjoyed a renaissance recently in the form of systems accessed through the exchange of electronic mail messages, such as the bibliography server described on page For example, the ephemeral interest group system [Brothers et al. If they wanted to get a copy of the discussion so far, users could send an email message to the server specifying the number of the group as well as a special keyword.

The server would reply with a return message containing its records of the specified discussion group. In a similar manner, users could join and leave interest groups and get a list of the other members of a group by sending specialized messages to the server. Many other services exist on various email systems, all based on batch-style interaction, and some computer systems can even be accessed through fax messages [Johnson et ai. The difference from traditional batch systems is that email and fax interfaces often can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

A major problem with time-sharing is the small amount of computational resources available to support the user interface for any given user, so early time-shared user interfaces often used line-oriented interfaces.

In spite of the primitive interfaces to early time-shared computers, the very introduction of such a major feature for the sole benefit of the human users gave rise to an increased awareness of user inter- face issues. Licklider, who played a central role in early work on time-sharing, also wrote a very influential paper, "Man- Computer Symbiosis" [Licklider ], which was an early call to arms for getting computers to reflect the user's needs and abilities more closely. As shown in Figure 4, line-oriented interfaces were basically one- dimensional interfaces, where the user could only interact with the computer on the single line that served as the command line.

Once the user had hit the return key, the input could be modified no further. Espe- cat reviews. The line-oriented interface allows the user to modify the last line only and is thus one dimensional.

The full-screen interface allows the user to move about in two dimensions, and the graphical interface almost adds a third dimension through the overlapping windows. Line-oriented interfaces were originally implemented on tele-typewriters TTYs , where the interaction was printed on an endless roll of paper passing through the typewriter.

Later versions did use terminal screens, but continued to treat the text as frozen once it had scrolled above the command line. Such an interface is often called a glass- TTY. The endless scroll of paper at least had the advantage of keeping a permanent record of the entire interaction and allowing the user access to large amounts of information.

Since line-oriented interfaces did not allow users to move about the screen, their interaction techniques were mostly limited to ques- tion-answer dialogues and the typing of commands with parame- ters. Question-answer dialogues involve exchanges prompted by the computer, where the user answers the computer's questions one at a time.

Such dialogues are thus especially suited for situa- tions where the dialogue is well structured with a small number of options that can be predicted in advance, and where it is acceptable to have the user be directed by the computer rather than having freedom to structure the task in alternative ways. Two problems with question-answer dialogues are that users may want to change earlier answers and that they need to answer the current question without knowing what the following questions will be.

A typical example of both these problems is the question "Enter city" as part of a dialogue to elicit a user's address. Most line-oriented user interfaces were built on command languages of various sorts, and much early research in the user interface field involved the proper selection of command names.

Some command languages are very powerful and allow the construction of very complicated sequences of commands with huge sets of modifiers and parameters. Unfortunately, command languages are normally also quite unforgiving of user errors since they require the user to specify the desired command in exactly the required format, which the user has to remember without much help from the computer.

To speed up interactions and reduce the risk of spelling errors, most command languages allow the user to abbreviate the command names. There are many reasonable ways to abbreviate commands, including truncation and vowel removal [Ehrenreich ]. The most important abbreviation guideline is to choose a single, consistent rule for generating the abbreviations [Streeter et al.

A classic use of the full screen is form-filling dialogues, where the user is presented with a number of labelled fields that can be edited in any sequence desired by the user. Form fill-in still exists in modern interfaces in the form of dialog boxes, even though dialog boxes are more dynamic than traditional forms since they can contain pop-up menus and other ways to make the computer help the user while the form is being filled out.

In addition to menus, which are discussed further in the subsection below, many full-screen interfaces also use function keys as a primary interaction style. In principle, a function key is just a pack- aging of a complete command into a single lexical user operation. Two main advantages of function keys are that they serve as inter- action accelerators and that there are so few of them that users often are able to learn them by heart.

Since the exact interpretation of a function key can depend on the screen object pointed to by the cursor, some uses of function keys allowed an early approximation to the point-and-click interaction style of modern mouse-based interfaces.

Menu Hierarchies Full-screen interfaces often depend heavily on hierarchically nested menus, with each menu taking up the full screen. In prin- ciple, menus can also be used in line-oriented interfaces, since it is possible for the user to choose from a menu by typing an indication of the desired option on the command line, even if the menu itself has scrolled up into the inactive area of the screen.

In practice, however, menus seem to be used more in full-screen systems, and they are of course also being used extensively in most modern window systems. The design of hierarchical menus [Paap and Roske-Hofstrand ] is especially important in many full-screen interfaces and has indeed been studied extensively.

The best advice is obviously to avoid hierarchical menus since they hide options from the user and require the introduction of an extra set of interaction techniques for navigating the hierarchy. Therefore, it is often better to overload a nonhierarchical menu slightly than to split it into a hierarchy.

As shown in Figure 5, a flat, broad menu does not require the user to go through as many levels as a deep menu, thereby reducing the need for user navigation.

At the same time, each node in the menu hierarchy becomes more complex in a flat menu structure, making the user choose between more options at each leveL Since both navigation and decisions take time, neither too deep nor too broad menu trees are desirable in generaL If one assumes that users will make no errors in selecting the correct option at each menu level, and if one knows the probability with which the user will select each menu option, then one can mathematically determine the optimal menu structure [Landauer and Nachbar ; Fisher et al.

These assumptions may be somewhat reasonable if the menus are only intended to be used by expert users or if the menu items have an "obvious" structure known to all users such as alphabetical or numerical order. For nonexpert users, however, the need to consider errors leads to a requirement for having the various submenus contain "natural" groupings of options, such that their names on the higher levels are as understandable as possible.

In recent years, many telephone-operated interfaces have been designed to allow users to access various forms of information and services, such as their bank account balance, over regular push- button telephones [Halstead-Nussloch ].

These systems are very often menu-based, but are otherwise closer to the line- oriented generation of user interfaces since the dialogue is completely linear. Telephone-operated interfaces are thus an example of the hybrid nature of menu interfaces and also indicate that the concept of "generations" of interfaces presented in this chapter should be seen more as a way to conceptualize the history of user interface design than as a sequential progression of inter- faces replacing each other.

Most current user interfaces belong to the category of graphical user interfaces sometimes referred to as WIMP systems windows, icons, menus, and a pointing device after their basic components. As can be seen in Figure 4, window interfaces almost add a third dimension to the two dimensions inherent in each window because of the possibility for overlapping windows. Of course, overlapping windows are not truly three-dimensional since it is not possible to see the content of obscured windows without moving them to the top, so it would be more accurate to refer to these interfaces as having two-and-a-half dimensions.

The primary interaction style used in many graphical user inter- faces is direct manipulation [Shneiderman ], which is based on visual representation of the dialogue objects of interest to the user.

As an example, the traditional way of specifying a margin indentation in a word processor would be to issue a command to indent by a certain number of spaces. Such a command is an indirect manipulation of the margin, however, and the user may have to try several times before the desired layout is achieved. In contrast, direct manipula- tion of a margin would involve dragging the margin itself or a margin marker to the desired position.

Since the user is getting continuous feedback about the positioning of the margin as it is being moved, the result should be less of a surprise. Of course, this example does show that direct manipulation may not be optimal for all tasks, in that it would be easier to achieve a very precise margin setting by typing in the number. Let's move from the interaction techniques to the structure of the interface.

Many graphical user interfaces can be said to be object- oriented. In a function-oriented interface, the interaction is structured around a set of commands issued by the user in various combinations to achieve the desired result. The main interface issue is how to provide easy access to these commands and their parameters, and typical solutions include command-line interfaces with various abbreviation options as well as full-screen menus.

Object-oriented interfaces are sometimes described as turning the application inside-out as compared to function-oriented interfaces. The main focus of the interaction changes to become the users' data and other information objects that are typically represented graphi- cally on the screen as icons or in windows.

Users achieve their goals by gradually massaging these objects using various modifi- cation features that are of course similar to the concept of 1. Note that I am talking about object-oriented interfaces. These interfaces may or may not be implemented using object-oriented programming which is a completely different issue. Once the interface has been structured around objects, it may feel natural to implemented these objects using object-oriented programming, but one can also implement object-oriented interfaces using traditional programming methods.

Unfortunately, experience shows that developers who are used to designing function-oriented user interfaces have serious difficulties in changing over to designing object-oriented interfaces [Nielsen et al. An example may clarify the distinction between function- and object-oriented interfaces and show why not just any graphical user interface is object-oriented. Consider the task of selecting certain information from a database, formatting the data, and printing the resulting report.

A function-oriented interface that was designed by participants in our study started by asking the user to specify the query criteria in a graphical dialog box. The book provides the tools. Usability engineering key tech Custom design and engineering services. Has process, capabilities and portfolio. Usability engineering - amazon. Carroll] on Amazon. Concepts: usability engineering - umass d Introduction.

Usability Engineering also called User-Centered Design is all about building better systems by getting a better understanding of the end-users, and. The usability engineering life cycle making the business Bias and Mayhew created the Usability Engineering Life Cycle UEL as a means to build a usability test plan.

If you can integrate the UEL into your product. Usability Engineering. Guidance for Industry and Food and Drug Administration Staff Iec - medical devices -- application of usability IEC Medical devices If the usability engineering process detailed in this International Standard has been complied with and the acceptance criteria Usability associates - we apply usability engineering to Usability Associates UA is a consulting firm that helps companies build usability into products sold in the marketplace, internal systems used by employees, and web Usability engineering by jakob nielsen - goodreads Usability Engineering has ratings and 5 reviews.

David said: As my first database design project to be used by someone else comes to a close, I find Usability introduction to usability - nielsen norman group What is usability? Jakob Nielsen defines key usability concepts - give to your boss or anyone else who Usability engineering - dictionary.

The results of the usability engineering process should be recorded in the usability engineering file; Usability engineering - sciencedirect The online version of Usability Engineering by Mary Beth Rosson and John M.

Understanding how people interact with technology and studying how user interface design affects the interactions people have 26 usability engineer jobs linkedin Today's top 26 Usability Engineer jobs in United States. International User Usability engineering : book by jakob nielsen Detailing the methods of usability engineering, this book provides the tools needed to avoid usability surprises and improve product quality.

Step-by-step information Agile usability engineering - interaction design foundation Agile Usability Engineering is a concept to describe a combination of methods and practices of agile development and usability engineering.

With our complete resources, you could find Usability Engineering PDF or just found any kind of Books for your readings everyday. You could find and download any books you like and save it into your disk without any problem at all. In software engineering, usability is the degree to which a software Usability engineering methods and tools - igi global Usability Engineering Methods and Tools: