Getting the Tool Right Or Getting the Right Tool? Tool Choice and Tool Switching in Complex Software
from Usability Professionals Association - Boston Chapter (UPA Boston)
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Tuesday, July 15, 2008, 6:00pm - 8:15pm
Modern software applications (toolkits) are feature-rich, offering multiple ways (tools) to accomplish each task, or part of a task. This raises two questions: If users are not applying the best possible tool to the work at all times, how can they reach the highest level of productivity, accuracy, and creativity? How does the toolkit's design bring this about?
The presenter's team is saddled with the User Centered Redesign of the core elements of a large engineering analysis product suite. The complexity and variety of user's tool switching schemes observed during usability testing led to hypotheses which could not be evaluated by standard observing techniques, or by stop-watching Camtasia recordings. Even the crudest and most tedious counting and timing of transitions between tools quickly led back to known problem tool transition patterns. This spurred development of automated data gathering and automatically generated metrics specifically for tool switching. These, combined with more familiar metrics, enable us to compare and rank different schemes of tool switching which we observe, and to "design toward" switching patterns which are more effective.
This way of describing user activity (focus on effective tool choice and switch timing) when applied to complex applications (Word, Excel, modern Integrated Development Environments) suggests that the activity theory (Card, Kuutti, Bodker) model of expert software usage, which underlies the commonly applied (lax, clumsy, ineffective) notion of "expert user", is an inadequate framework for iterative User-Centered Design, and needs to be replaced.
Bio:
Will has been a Principal Usability Specialist at The MathWorks since 2005. Previous indentures include seventeen years designing and testing hardware and embedded software at Foster-Miller, Inc. and twelve years as Principal at User Interface Engineering doing usability consulting and research on hardware, software, and the web.
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