Software Tool Evaluation Factor 2: Usability

Why is usability important?

Imagine: You´ve evaluated software tools and found a winner. Now you present the tool to the users and they visit a training session and then try out to do their daily work in the new tool. Their answer is after a few days:

The tool is much more complicated, it takes me too much time to find the functionalities I need for my daily work. The tools have tons of menus with tons of functionalities, but it is not intuitive, the menu is completely different than in the old tool. The users start to do their work outside of the tool, using text editors, calculating sheets and e-Mails or use the old tool. But the reason for the new tool was to abandon this type of work.

What have you done wrong during the evaluation?

1. You did not include the users, who must use the tool daily
2. You did not look for usability features but only for functionalities

The biggest obstacle during a software tool evaluation is to find the right balance between functionality and usability.

Here are some usability criteria you should ask during the evaluation:

1. Does the GUI have a standard and common behavior?
   1. Standard style menus
   2. Easy to memorize keyboard shortcuts
   3. Macros or batches to simplify more complex actions
   4. Online help and search is available and easy to use
   5. User documentation is appropriate and well structured
2. Visual appearance
   1. Interface is consistent with a standard like CUA
   2. The layout is logical and well organized
   3. The pages and dialog boxes are not overloaded with tons of options
   4. Ease of navigation
   5. Easily move between pages / dialog boxes
   6. Fonts and colors are changeable or easy to read
   7. Layout can be adjusted
   8. The layout helps quickly find what users are looking for
3. The number of mouse-clicks or keyboard strokes is efficient for my work
4. Scroll around pages and find the right information is intuitive
5. Decimals, dates and currencies are displayed consistently and can be adjusted in different localization formats
6. The system is intuitive and easy to learn, learning curve is appropriate
7. The response times are suitable for the intended use of the tool
8. The tool allows personalization of menus, keystrokes and tabs
9. Exception and Error assistance and recovery is understandable und logical
10. Undo functionality allows to go back after accidental deletions or additions or changes
11. Looks-ups for fields like name, city, country, phone numbers

The users should specify the 10 actions they need on a regular basis and must prove, whether these actions are easy to use and perform.

Let at least 5 different users with 5 different areas of usage should play around with the tool to prove the usability. Create a matrix with scoring for the users and let them enter scores for these different types of usability.

Example for scoring

Usage	Points
Excellent	5
Good	3
Poor	1
Not existent	0

Next you should create a multiplicator for the different usage scenarios. This may be a weight factor like 1.5, 1.0, 0.5.