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Iterative User-Interface Design Iterative User-Interface Design Jakob Nielsen, Bellcore ecause even the best usability experts cannot design perfect user interfac- es in a single attempt. interface designers should build a usability- engineering life cycle around the concept of iterati0n.l Iterative devel- opment of user interfaces involves steady design refinement based on user testing and other evaluation methods. Interface designers complete a design and note the problems several test users have using it. They then fix these problems in a new iteration. which they test again to ensure that the “fixes” did indeed solve the problems and to find any new usability problems introduced by the changed design. Normally. the design changes from one iteration to the next are local to the specific interface elements that caused user difficulties. An iterative design meth- odology does not involve blindly replacing interface elements with new, alterna- tive design ideas. If designers must choose between two or more interface alterna- tives, they can perform comparative testing to measure which alternative is the most usable. However, such tests are usually viewed as constituting a methodology different from iterative design as such, and they are most often devised to measure rather than find usability problems. Iterative design aims specifically at refinement based on lessons learned from previous iterations. The user tests I present in this article were rigorous, with a fairly large number of test subjects measured carefully in several different ways while performing a fixed set of tasks for each system. In many practical usability-engineering situa- tions,h however, we can gain sufficient insight into the usability problems in a design iteration with only a few test subjects. and it may not be necessary to collect quantitative measurement data. The quantitative measures emphasized in this article may be useful for management in larger projects. but they are not the main F~~~ studies show goal of usability evaluations. Instead, the principal outcome of a usability evalua- that redesigning user tion in a practical development project is a list of usability problems and sugges- tions for interface improvements. interfaces On the basis After a general discussion of iteration and usability metrics. I present four of user testing - examples of iterative user-interface design and measurement. iterating through at Benefits of iteration least three versions - can substantially To show the value of iteration in usability engineering, Karat’ analyzed a commercial development project in which the user interface to a computer security improve usability. application was tested and improved through three versions. For a lower-bound 32 I estimate of the value of the user-inter- them visible and presumably easier to face improvements, she calculated the Reconceptualizing understand. User satisfaction on a l-to- time saved by users due to quicker task 5 rating scale (where 5 corresponded to completion. thus leaving out any value “like very much”) increased from 3.4 of the other improvements. The securi- for the command-line-based version to ty application had 22,876 users. Each 4.2 for the menu-based version, indicat- could be expected to save 4.67 minutes interaction bugs ing a drastic improvement in usability by using version 3 rather than version 1 for the reconceptualized interface. to perform a set of 12 initial tasks (cor- responding to one day’s system use), for lteration a total savings of 1,781 work hours. From Usability metrics and this. Karat estimated saved personnel Figure 1. The conceptual relation be- costs of $41,700. which compared very tween interface usability and number overall usability favorably with the increased develop- of design iterations. ment costs of $20.700 for iterative de- A system’s overall quality is actually sign. The true savings were likely to be a sum of many quality attributes, only considerably larger. since the improved it over time. For example, the task of one of which is usability. Additionally, interface was also faster after the first programming a computer has been re- a system should be socially acceptable day. conceptualized several times, with lan- and practically feasible with respect to Figure 1 shows a conceptual graph of guages changing from octal machine cost, maintainability, and so on. The the relation between design iterations code to mnemonic assembler to higher system should fit users’ job needs and and interface usability. Ideally, each it- level programming languages. let them produce high-quality results, eration would result in an interface bet- Figure 1 shows a reconceptualization since that is the reason for having the ter than the previous version, but as I after a long period of stable usability for system at all. I do not consider these show later, this is not always true in a system. but we do not really know issues here because they are related to practice. Some changes in an interface what leads to the creative insights nec- utility: whether the system’s functional- may turn out not to be improvements. essary for a fundamentally novel and ity can do what is needed. This article Therefore. the true usability curve for a better interface design. Interface recon- focuses on usability. that is, on how well particular product would not be as ceptualizations may not always be im- users can use that functionality. (The smooth as the curve in Figure 1. Even mediately followed by the increased concept of utility is not necessarily re- so, Figure 1 reflects the general nature usability indicated in Figure 1. A funda- stricted to work-oriented software. Ed- of iterative design, though we do not yet mental redesign may introduce unex- ucational software has high utility if have enough documented case studies pected usability problems that design- students learn from it, and an entertain- to estimate the curve precisely. ers would have to iron out with a few ment product has high utility if it is fun.) The first few iterations will in general additional iterations. Despite simplified conceptual illus- probably result in major usability gains We know of interface reconceptual- trations like Figure 1. usability is not as interface designers find and fix the izations in individual development really a one-dimensional property of a true “usability catastrophes.” Later it- projects mainly through anecdotal evi- user interface. A system is usable if it is6 erations have progressively smaller po- dence. They have not been documented tential for improvements because the or had their usability impact measured. easy to learn, so users can go quickly major usability problems are eliminat- One exception is the development of an from not knowing the system to ed, and the design may eventually be- electronic white pages system by a large doing some work: come so polished that very little poten- telephone company. The system was efficient, letting the expert user at- tial for further improvement remains. intended to let customers with home tain a high level of productivity; Because the number of documented computers search for telephone num- easy to remember, so infrequent cases is small. we do not yet know the bers. Search terms could be matched users can return after a period of point of diminishing returns in terms of either exactly or phonetically. and users inactivity without having to learn number of iterations. We do not even could expand searches to a larger geo- everything all over: know for sure whether there is an upper graphical area. relatively error-free or error-forgiv- limit on the usability of an interface or Unfortunately, even after the itera- ing, so users do not make many er- whether it would be possible to improve tive design had been through 14 ver- rors, and so those errors are not some interfaces indefinitely with con- sions, test users still said they were in- catastrophic (and are easily recov- tinued substantial gains for each itera- timidated and frustrated by the system. ered from): and tion. At this stage, the designers decided to pleasant to use, satisfying users sub- Assuming that designers stay with the abandon the basic interface design, jectively, so they like to use the sys- same basic interface and keep refining which was based on a command-line tem. it, I feel that there is a limit to the level interface. From the insight that the com- of usability they can achieve. At the mand line made the system’s structure Focusingon usability as a quality goal. same time, I believe that designers can invisible to the user, they reconceptual- we can define it in terms of these five often break such limits by rethinking ized the interface. The redesigned in- attributes. We numerically character- and completely redesigning the inter- terface had a menu of services display- ize each attribute with a metric. In the face as they gain more experience with ing all options at all times, thus making usability field, such metrics are com- November 1993 33 monly defined in terms of the perfor- for the time being, since the analytical indicating a 33 percent improvement in mance of randomly chosen representa- methods can be rather difficult to ap- usability. In the same way, the normal- tive users who do representative, bench- ply.’O ized usability of interface 2 would still mark tasks with the system. Usability Often, usability engineers engage be 133 percent if users made eight er- measures are empirically derived num- about 10 test users for usability mea- rors with interface 1 and six errors with bers resulting from one or more such surements, though sometimes they con- interface 2. metrics applied to a concrete user inter- duct tests with 20 or more users for tight Converting measures of subjective face. This progression from quality goals confidence intervals on the measure- satisfaction into improvement scores is to quality attributes and their metrics, ment results.
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