Featured

Usability: Agile usability for rapid development

By Dr. Martin Hicks and
Erdeniz Hassan, lead
research consultants at fhios.

During an economic downturn, online vendors face tough decisions when allocating spending to website development projects and user experience research. With budget and resource constraints, creative and user experience agencies have had to be more competitive and cope with increasingly shorter project timescales, whereas the quality of the deliverables must not suffer. To address these challenges, creative design and user experience agencies have adapted by utilising lightweight approaches or so called ‘agile usability’ methods.

Researchers at fhios, a global user experience research and design consultancy, have developed an agile testing and reporting process whereby summary recommendations can be quickly fed back into the development cycle. This approach has enabled a fast turnaround on subsequent testing iterations and has fostered a continuing user validation culture between user experience consultants and designers/developers.

So what is an ‘Agile’ approach? At a high level, it involves a quick succession of usability test iterations with few participants. Between test iterations, debriefs between user experience and developers help to ensure that any important usability issues raised during the sessions are not overlooked. Where applicable, findings from one product could be applied to another product, and the stakeholders and researchers can agree that preemptively changing the product would eliminate common errors that were sure to arise.

Figure 1 below presents an overview of the agile user testing and development iterations, highlighting the interaction between the development and user experience teams.

In addition to these debriefing sessions, at fhios we ensure that developers receive user experience summary reports which summarise findings and recommendations following each day of testing. As the testing progresses, this document forms an evolving report which presents findings from all iterations for each of the products tested. We have found that this reporting style helps to validate and keep track of all usability issues exposed during the study.

The benefits
The ongoing debrief and reporting process provided by the user experience team has helped developers to quickly identify any outstanding or new issues with the products being tested. Moreover, we found that 70% of usability issues were identified in the first round of iterative testing, with the number of issues diminishing thereafter as the prototypes were modified and refined following further testing iterations. This approach has enabled a fast turnaround on subsequent testing iterations and has fostered a continuing user validation culture between user experience consultants and developers. In addition, cost can be reduced as agile testing provides a means to support multiple projects on a smaller budget.

Our agile studies have demonstrated that the applicability of agile testing within user experience research is particularly suited when: 1) fast prototype development is required, and 2) the development teams are amenable to rapid communication during the iterative design process.

Points to consider
Agile testing can be hugely beneficial in the right context and below we outline some points to consider from our experience:

• Report writing can cause practical problems if you have set ambitions too high; interim reports require very rapid turnaround so the findings should be very concise and relate to key problems with the experience; background information can be included in the final report at a later stage where applicable.
• Project objectives should be explicit and signed off before the project commences; there is little time to adapt the discussion guide midproject.
• Leverage the opportunity to test significant changes to the prototype; these could entail paperbased mockups after the main
  testing session, or trying out a new idea with 1 or 2 participants before including it in the next iteration.
• Close client contact is essential – use face to face and telephone briefings to clarify any misunderstandings and convey your view on the user experience more directly.
• Discuss with developers the amount of time that is needed to realistically implement design changes in between iterations; if too little time is allocated the prototype may not have changed sufficiently to warrant the agile process, or the testing sessions may have to be rescheduled.

fhios has performed research enabling rapid product development with high user acceptance on comparatively small budgets.

© 2009 fhios insights.