Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Effectiveness
- Does it do the job?
Efficiency
- How easily does it do the job?
Satisfaction
- How enjoyable (or at least un-stressful) is it to do the job?
While this can be interpreted to apply at the level of workgroups or organisations, it is more
common to look only at the user directly interacting with a system. However, it is important to
keep one's focus more broadly on all stakeholders. The interface to a CRM (customer relationship
management) system at a call center does not just affect the telephonist taking the call, but also
the customer at the other end, even though the customer does not directly interact with the CRM
system or even know that it exists.
For many years, the first two factors in the ISO standard, effectiveness and efficiency, were
dominant in usability thinking - basically allowing people to work better. However, gradually, the last
of these, namely satisfaction, has become more important for several reasons. First, is has been widely
recognized in work situations that a happy worker is a more productive worker! Second, enjoyment
may now be the primary objective as computer systems have spread out of the office and into the
home and public places. Finally, as many systems are now delivered over the web, applications that
were once shrink wrapped (e.g., Word Processing) are now delivered as services (e.g., Google docs);
while a product is delivered once only with a single purchase decision, services have many decision
points - it is easy to change services and more importantly to maintain the users' good will. As we
shall see in Section
4.1
, this shift to web delivery also includes many traditional data services.
This shift of concerns has lead to the notion of
user experience
as part of, or often subsuming,
usability. Instead of seeing users merely as operators, their overall experience of using a product or
service becomes a primary goal.
Of course, users are not all the same, and this has led to a focus on customizability and
personalization, both for desktop applications and for those delivered over the web. Perhaps, most
importantly, we are not all the same in terms of our physical, perceptual, and cognitive abilities.
With an aging population, 'disability' of some kind or another will become the norm - ignoring
those with reduced or different abilities may cut you off from a large segment of the population.
However, it is not just good ethics and good for business that one should cater for a wide range of
abilities; in many countries, accessibility legislation demands that usability really means usability for
everyone. Cutting corners on usability can land you in court. In Section
5.1
, we examine some of
the implications of accessibility for data management.
1.4
COST-BENEFITS OF USABILITY
Focusing on users takes time, effort, and money; it can be hard to quantify benefits and hence to
determine just how much effort is worth spending to make improvements (although one can make
good estimates
Bias and Mayhew
,
2005
). Given this, it may be tempting to either ignore it as an
issue entirely or, alternatively, to obsessively attempt to iron out every slight difficulty.
However, in order to avoid the high cost of poor utilization and produce a successful system,
usability must be made a priority. In the example at the beginning of this section, we saw that
