How do usability professionals construe usability?

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Abstract

Usability professionals have attained a specialist role in systems-development projects. This study analyses usability professionals’ operational understanding of usability by eliciting the constructs they employ in their thinking about system use. We approach usability broadly and without a priori distinguishing it from user experience. On the basis of repertory-grid interviews with 24 Chinese, Danish, and Indian usability professionals we find that they make use of more utilitarian than experiential, i.e. user-experience related, constructs. This indicates that goal-related performance is central to their thinking about usability, whereas they have less elaborate sets of experiential constructs. The usability professionals mostly construe usability at an individual level, rather than at organizational and environmental levels. The few exceptions include effectiveness constructs, which are evenly spread across all three levels, and relational constructs, which are phrased in terms of social context. Considerations about users’ cognitive activities appear more central to the usability professionals than conventional human-factors knowledge about users’ sensorial abilities. The usability professionals’ constructs, particularly their experiential constructs, go considerably beyond ISO 9241 usability, indicating a discrepancy between this definition of usability and the thinking of the professionals concerned with delivering usability. Finally, usability is construed rather similarly across the three nationalities of usability professionals.

Highlights

► More of the usability professionals’ constructs are utilitarian than experiential. ► Usability professionals’ understanding of usability goes beyond ISO usability. ► Usability is mostly construed at an individual level by the usability professionals. ► Usability professionals construe usability rather similarly across nationality. ► At times usability is about social context and connections among people, not about technology.

Introduction

In parallel with the increasing recognition of usability and user experience as important qualities in human–computer interactions, usability professionals have emerged to work with usability in systems-development projects (e.g., Boivie et al., 2006, Rauch and Wilson, 1995, Vredenburg et al., 2002). A usability profession is establishing itself with professional societies, codes of professional conduct, and a repertory of concepts and techniques. Usability professionals hold varying responsibilities, as suggested by job titles such as customer-experience architect, human-factors specialist, interaction designer, usability engineer, user-experience manager, and user researcher, but surveys show that they also share some core activities and ways of thinking (Clemmensen, 2006, Gulliksen et al., 2004, Rosenbaum et al., 2000, Vredenburg et al., 2002). The notion of usability, broadly defined, is central to usability professionals’ work but conceptually diverse (Hertzum, 2010) and experienced as fuzzy by usability professionals (Boivie et al., 2006). We consider it particularly interesting to investigate usability professionals’ thinking about usability because this group of participants in systems-development projects is explicitly tasked with usability issues, because their conception of usability is central to the usability of the resulting systems, and because a well-understood usability concept is important to the emerging usability profession. In addition, we consider a conceptual focus important because people’s concepts are intricately involved in shaping their behaviour.

In this paper we analyse how usability professionals working in industry construe usability. This focus differs from previous studies, which have focused on usability professionals’ disciplinary background, their role in projects, the activities in which they are involved, the techniques they use, and the barriers they experience toward user-centred design (e.g., Clemmensen, 2003, Gould and Lewis, 1985, Gulliksen et al., 2004, Rosenbaum et al., 2000, Vredenburg et al., 2002). A focus on usability professionals’ thinking about usability may inform discussions about their contribution to systems-development projects, because thinking interacts with behaviour, as well as discussions about the notion of usability as such, because most other descriptions of usability are analytic definitions such as ISO 9241-11 (1998). Empirically, we interview 24 practicing usability professionals from three national usability communities about the constructs they employ in their thinking about the usability of systems with which they have personal experience. Our study has four characteristics:

  • We approach usability broadly and without a priori distinguishing it from user experience. This is consistent with ISO 9241-210 (2010) and provides for an analysis of how usability professionals balance utilitarian and experiential aspects in their thinking about usability. We adopt the terms utilitarian and experiential from, for example, Gentile et al. (2007), but note that others make a similar distinction by means of the terms usability and user experience (e.g., Naumann et al., 2009).

  • We focus on systems with which the usability professionals have personal experience. We do this because it is their operational understanding of system use we seek to describe, not their ability to provide lexical definitions of usability. The assumption is that usability professionals – through their education and practical experience – develop a set of constructs for discriminating among situations and reflecting on insights. These operational constructs are mainly formed by practice and may or may not align with analytic definitions.

  • To elicit the usability professionals’ constructs we conduct our interviews using Kelly’s (1955) repertory-grid technique. According to Kelly, a person perceives the world in terms of a personal repertory of bipolar constructs. Each construct enables the person to distinguish between objects based on how similar they are to either of the two ends of the construct. With increasing knowledge and experience a person’s repertory of constructs becomes larger and, thereby, provides for making finer distinctions.

  • The usability profession is international. Whereas previous studies of usability professionals have either focused on one country (e.g., Bygstad et al., 2008) or averaged across nationalities (e.g., Vredenburg et al., 2002), we compare usability professionals in three countries: China, Denmark, and India. The usability profession has evolved differently in these countries, and the Chinese, Danish, and Indian usability professionals may therefore construe usability differently.

Our focus on usability professionals implies a belief that “usability issues require aspecialist’ role” (Boivie et al., 2006, p. 604). This belief is the rationale for the emerging usability profession. Usability professionals have been seen as a variant of human-factors professionals working with informatics (Lindgaard, 2009) and as designers, psychologists, or both (Carroll, 1997). Some may even argue that usability professionals are able to think like users (e.g., Militello, 1998). In the following, we review related work on the knowledge, role, and national communities of usability professionals, describe the method and results of our interviews with usability professionals, and discuss their thinking about usability.

Section snippets

Related work

Inspired by Meister’s (2004) characterization of the human-factors profession in terms of the conceptual structures held by human-factors professionals, the methods and techniques they employ, and the importance they attach to the human-factors community, we account in the following for related work on usability professionals’ conception of usability, their role in systems-development projects, and their national usability communities.

Method

Repertory-grid interviews were conducted with 24 usability professionals to elicit their usability constructs. The repertory-grid technique was devised by Kelly (1955) as a means of eliciting people’s personal constructs, and it has been successfully used in multiple studies of systems development, design, and use (Hassenzahl et al., 2000; Tan and Hunter, 2002).

Results

A total of 316 construct/contrast pairs were elicited by the 24 participants, corresponding to an average of 13.17 pairs per participant. The minimum number of construct/contrast pairs elicited by a single participant was 7, the maximum 20. Below, we first analyse the constructs for each of the four classifications individually, then the interrelations across the classifications, the differences in constructs across participants’ nationality, and finally the contrasts for selected constructs.

Discussion

We see three main characteristics in the usability professionals’ thinking about usability. In the following, we first discuss how they balance utilitarian and experiential constructs, then how they mostly construe system use at an individual level, and finally that they construe usability rather similarly across nationality.

Conclusion

A usability profession is emerging with concepts, roles, and local communities aimed at supporting usability professionals in defining and fulfilling their role in systems-development projects. Through repertory-grid interviews with 24 usability professionals from three countries, this study has analysed their operational understanding of usability, developed through years of education and practice. We find three characteristics of the usability professionals’ thinking about usability:

  • They

Acknowledgements

This study is part of the Cultural Usability project, which is co-funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research (DCIR). We thank Jyoti Kumar and Qingxin Shi, who conducted the interviews in India and China (the Danish interviews were conducted by the second author), and Xianghong Sun and Pradeep Yammiyavar, who provided the infrastructure that made the interviews in China and India possible. Special thanks are due to the interviewees, who participated in the study in spite of their busy

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