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Usability Engineering 10 Years Later

June 24th, 2009 — Engineering

It’s been 10 years since Mayhew wrote “The Usability Engineering Lifecycle,” How far has usability come since then?

It sometimes surprises me to find out that my parents were right. I distinctly remember them saying “Boy, time sure does speed up as you get older, where does the time go?” I thought they were crazy. I thought this especially when me and my other 10-year-old friends spent hours on the front porch saying “What do you want to do?” “I don’t know, what do YOU want to do?”

The Usability Engineering LifecycleSo it’s rather odd that it seems to me like just a few years ago, not ten, that Mayhew brought “The Usability Engineering Lifecycle” to the world. How far have we come in ten years? Do you feel like the last ten years just zipped by? What about usability, do you think it’s come a long way down the maturity path?

I wonder what you think?

Here’s what I think…

Usability Engineering Ten Years Ago

I recall that ten years ago I felt usability testing and user-centered design principals were not very common in development projects. I would say projects that included user-centered design were in the minority, the vast majority being conducted without a thought to usability or user-centered design.

For those of you who were there doing usability at that time, remember that whole Y2K issue and all the major projects to ensure all systems would work after computer clocks clicked over to 2000? For me, it was rather difficult to get web site projects done what with all the hysteria, but when they were worked on luckily I had a senior level Boss that was a champion for usability. Together, we inserted usability testing as part of the process of the major web site redesign projects we were responsible for.

Unfortunately, it was not that easy to insert usability into web and application development projects we were not directly responsible for. There were other business owners and their supporting I.T. staff in different divisions of our company that designed and built web sites or web-based applications with zero usability or user-centered design. Most of the time usability was not even thought of, but sometimes if we cajoled or otherwise influenced them regarding the value of usability we might get lucky, and usability would be included.

The worst case for us was internally developed and utilized applications. Intranets and employee-focused internal apps had zero usability, and there was no interest in “slowing down” to make changes that might impact the delivery dates of said applications.

If you were working in a business or a design or development firm in 1999 did you have the same experiences?

At that time, after pouring through “The Usability Engineering Lifecycle,” I felt like I had a new friend at my side! It was like a breath of fresh air. In this book was a detailed description of exactly how to incorporate usability and user-centered design as part of the Software Development Lifecycle. It provided helpful war-stories of how usability sometimes did and sometimes didn’t make it into the early stages of design and development projects. It gave me lots of good ideas for “selling” usability.

Usability Engineering Today

So here we are, ten years later, and according to a recent User Experience Maturity Survey by Human Factors International 52% of the over 1,000 survey respondents said they have a usability champion at their company that supports user experience design! That’s really good news! We have indeed come a long way baby.

If you are one of those who have an executive champion that pushes the user experience design method and insists it be present for all development projects then congratulations.

Clearly as witnessed by this study, usability and user-centered design have much more support today than they did ten years ago.

For those of us without an executive champion, there’s still more work to do to get user-centered design incorporated into the company.

Even today, ten years later, I’ve seen plenty of examples where there are parts of a company where the usability executive champion has sway, but in other divisions in which the executive champion does not hold sway usability and user-centered design is still not practiced.

For example, I’ve witnessed (and been forced to use) many intranets and internally-built employee-focused applications that are designed and developed with no usability – zero user-centered design! You can tell when you attempt to use them. Ouch.

Glass Half FullSo, we’ve indeed come a long way in getting usability institutionalized into the corporate fabric. The glass is half full! But (according to the study) we still have about 50% of companies that don’t have a usability champion. The glass is half empty!

If you are one of those toiling away trying to get usability in your business don’t give up! Consider reading, or re-reading “The Usability Engineering Lifecycle.” Even though it was written ten years ago, the concepts are still as true today as they were ten years ago, and the war stories just might help give you ideas you can use at your company to get usability added to development. There is still a considerable amount of helpful information you can put to use with your situation.

Usability Engineering 1999-2009

But that’s just my opinion about the last ten years of usability engineering. What do you think? Is the usability glass half full, or half empty?

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