Certified Usable and XPDesigner EXPLAINED!
Category: current-news | Author: Craig Errey | Date: 31/10/2006
Over the last few months, many people have asked me just two questions: 'What is your big project all about?' and 'What is Certified Usable?'
We have a tendency to make things a little more complicated than they really are. Let me deal with Certified Usable first.
Essentially, Certified Usable is a guarantee that following an appropriate user interface design and evaluation process, we can guarantee that the application will meet a certain level of user performance.
For example, we can guarantee that when the application is live, a given transaction will take 3 minutes (+/- 10%) and users will report a 90% level of satisfaction (we all know you can't please everyone all of the time!!).
To make the guarantee meaningful, it is backed by our Professional indemnity insurance of $10,000,000.
What does this really mean for you? In many other industries you, as a consumer, have guarantees and warranties if the product fails to deliver what it is supposed to. Professional services rarely offer guarantees except in the form of return of fees or a problem is fixed on the supplier's time (that is, if they can't charge you with a change request!!). We've taken this one step further and tied our service delivery quality to our professional indemnity (PI) insurance. Most people use their PI to cover themselves if things go wrong. We use it to guarantee that what we deliver will achieve what we say it will.
Now, onto our big project.
This is one of the most exciting projects we've worked on. Some of you know that we've spent the last 3 years or so working on a structured and systematic approach to user interface design, called XPDesign (we're still trying to find a new name!!).
Our new project is about taking this methodology and building a software tool around it to rapidly create a user interface and simulate its behaviour. This user interface can be used to precisely define what the business wants and it can be tested with end users to confirm that it works and will achieve the expected productivity and efficiency benefits.
We successfully competed for an AusIndustry Commercial Ready Grant of $437,175 over 21 months. The Government assists projects like ours when there is considerable technical risk to overcome. In our case, we are attempting to create a visual application design and development tool that will allow people, like BAs, developers and usability practitioners to completely design and simulate the application and its behaviour.
30 years of trying hasn't produced a visual tool like the one we hope to develop. Most of the similar visual tools we've looked at still require programming skills — not very useful if you don't know how to program. With a growing trend to engage BAs that are not programmers, we're creating a tool that will let them represent business processes and rules in a user interface without using complex and technical approaches like UML. This will let the BAs focus on the most important things — business rules and the application's user interface — the two things that directly contribute to people's performance. Simulating the application lets the business and users test drive the new application to see if it works and delivers on business objectives before making a large and risky investment.
As we progress with the project, we'll keep you updated.
