Designing the Total User Experience at IBM: An Examination of Case Studies, Research Findings, and Advanced Methods

Transcription

1 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION, 14(3&4), Copyright 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Designing the Total User Experience at IBM: An Examination of Case Studies, Research Findings, and Advanced Methods Karel Vredenburg Corporate User-Centered Design, IBM IBM is a diverse multinational company that strives to lead in the creation, development, and manufacture of the world s most advanced information technologies, including computer systems, software, networking systems, storage devices, and microelectronics. Worldwide research labs work in all areas of information technology, from physics and cognitive science to leading-edge application research, while the IBM network of solutions and services professionals translates the advanced technologies into additional business value for our customers. IBM operates in more than 160 countries and has more than 319,000 employees worldwide. Critical to the success of our information technologies is a strategic focus on the design of the total user experience in our offerings by applying our user-centered design(ucd) process, incorporating findings from basic human computer interaction research, and continually improving our UCD methodologies and technologies. Because a human factors organization was first established at IBM in the mid-1950s, the company has used various usability and human factors methods. The IBM version of UCD was first developed in the early 1990s (Vredenburg, 1999) based on the seminal work of Norman and Draper (1986). Our version of UCD is an Professor Gavriel Salvendy proposed the idea of this special issue to me while we were both at the 2001 ACM SIGCHI conference in Seattle, Washington. I sincerely thank Dr. Salvendy for his vision and support. I also thank Professor Kay Stanney for her advice and patience. In addition, I am grateful to Brian Craig for his skillful production editing. As special issue editor, I had the support of a core team at IBM, the help of more than 80 practitioners and researchers from across the industry who served as reviewers, and of course, a wonderful group of authors who managed to write these articles while designing and developing our products and services. Members of the core team included Dick Berry, Linda Liebelt, Bob Jones, Michael Muller, Collin Powel, Paul Smith, and Alan Tannenbaum. This volume would not have been possible without the hard work of all of these people. I also gratefully acknowledge Tony Temple, Vice President, Ease of Use, and Susan Mills, Director, User Technologies, for their leadership and support of the User-Centered Design program at IBM. DB2, IBM, ThinkPad, and Universal Database are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Requests for reprints should be sent to Karel Vredenburg, IBM Canada, 8200 Warden Ave, Mail Drop 834/B2, Markham, ONT L6G 1C7 Canada. karel@ca.ibm.com

2 276 Vredenburg approach for designing competitive ease-of-use into the total user experience with products and systems. It ensures that they are easy to buy, easy to set up, easy to learn, easy to use, easy to upgrade, engaging, intuitive, and integrated. It requires a two-pronged approach: (a) having a multidisciplinary team design the solution starting with the externals and covering everything the user sees, hears, and touches; and (b) gathering continual user input via UCD feedback methods. The IBM UCD approach is designed to be integrated, scalable, and fast. As a result, the approach is unique in several respects. The IBM UCD process prescribes designing the total user experience from the time a potential customer sees an advertisement about a product or service to the time they consider upgrading that product or service. In contrast, previous approaches typically only focused on the graphical user interface itself, in the case of software; or on such things as the computer keyboard, in the case of hardware. To carry out the process, IBM uses a multidisciplinary team to design everything the user sees, hears, and touches. IBM uses a variety of UCD techniques from heavy duty to lightweight, and specifies when each is appropriate. Not all projects are the same; therefore, UCD does not have a one-size-fits-all solution. The process focuses on affective as well as cognitive and behavioral aspects of a customer s interaction with an offering. In other words, it aims not just to prevent major usability problems, but also to delight customers with an offering. Measurements taken throughout the project are a key element of IBM UCD. Many industry practitioners believe that ease of use and related attributes cannot be measured or managed. We disagree. We have developed an extensive set of measurements to be taken throughout a project to help identify problems and make midcourse corrections. These provide a powerful means for managing projects so that they address business needs and satisfy customers. IBM has further optimized UCD with state-of-the-art tools and technologies. Activities that used to take days and weeks now take a few minutes. IBM has developed a getting started package that includes introductory presentations, development team education classes, executive education workshops, and consulting services to get a project started quickly. IBM has established an organization to optimize UCD and deploy it throughout the company. This corporate UCD team includes a vice president of Ease of Use, a director of User Technologies, a corporate UCD architect, divisional Ease-of-Use Champions, and UCD advisory council members. Regular intranet Webcasts and meetings ensure that all members of the multidisciplinary company-wide team are aware of strategic directions, important research findings, and best practices from across the company and around the industry. All of these factors combined have made our introduction and deployment of UCD at IBM highly effective. However, we continue to focus on achieving even greater dramatic, or quantum leap, improvements in designing delight into the total user experience of our offerings. This special issue of the International Journal of Human Computer Interaction includes case studies that illustrate the use of UCD in the development of products

3 Designing the Total User Experience at IBM 277 and systems, as well as research focused on further improving the design of the total user experience itself and the methods used to achieve it. The articles in this issue are grouped into three sections. The first characterizes a series of case studies illustrating our use of UCD in the development of our award-winning software product, DB2 Universal Database (Sobiesiak, Jones, & Lewis); our industry-leading ThinkPad notebook computer (Sawin, Yamazaki, & Kumaki); our highly successful Web design work for the Sydney Olympic Summer Games (Healy & Herder), and a summary of UCD consulting work for customers (Ominsky, Stern, & Rudd). The second section of articles in this issue features work from our research and development divisions examining a variety of design topics: streaming multimedia Web experiences (Karat et al.), ubiquitous computing (Lai, Mitchell, Viveros, Wood, & Lee), diagrammatic procedural instructions for complex tasks (Rodriguez), and use of auditory waiting cues (Polkosky & Lewis). The third section of articles in this issue reports on a variety of projects devoted to enhancing the methods, techniques, and methodologies of UCD. These include an article describing an enhancement of the heuristic evaluation method (Kamper), a psychometric assessment of the widely used Post-Study System Usability Questionnaire (Lewis), ways of optimizing remote user studies (McFadden, Hager, Elie, & Blackwell), a story-based approach to design (Gruen, Rauch, Redpath, & Ruettinger), and a rigorous engineering approach for crafting a compelling user experience (Bardon, Berry, Bjerke, & Roberts). Further details on our integrated approach to UCD can be found in the book User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach (Vredenburg, Isensee, & Righi, 2002). REFERENCES Bardon, D., Berry, D., Bjerke, C., & Roberts, D. (2002). Crafting the compelling user experience. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 14, Gruen, D., Rauch, T., Redpath, S., & Ruettinger, S. (2002). The use of stories in user experience design. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 14, Healy, V., & Herder, R. (2002). A walk-up-and-use information system for the Sydney Olympics: A case study in user-centered design. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 14, Kamper, R. J. (2002). Extending the usability of heuristics for design and evaluation: Lead, follow, and get out of the way. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 14, Karat, C.-M., Karat, J., Vergo, J., Pinhanez, C., Riecken, D., & Cofino, T. (2002). That s entertainment! Designing streaming, multimedia web experiences. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 14, Lai, J., Mitchell, S., Viveros, M., Wood, D., & Lee, K. M. (2002). Ubiquitous access to unified messaging: A study of usability and the use of pervasive computing. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 14, Lewis, J. R. (2002). Psychometric evaluation of the PSSUQ using data from five years of usability studies. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 14, McFadden, E., Hager, D. R., Elie, C. J., & Blackwell, J. M. (2002). Remote usability evaluation: Overview and case studies. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 14,

4 278 Vredenburg Norman, D. A., & Draper, S. W. (1986). User-centered system design: New perspectives on human computer interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Ominsky, M., Stern, K. R., & Rudd, J. R. (2002). User-centered design at IBM consulting. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 14, Polkosky, M. D., & Lewis, J. R. (2002). Effect of auditory waiting cues on time estimation in speech recognition telephony applications. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 14, Rodriguez, M. A. (2002). Development of diagrammatic procedural instructions for performing complex one-time tasks. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 14, Sawin, D. A., Yamazaki, K., & Kumaki, A. (2002). Putting the D in UCD: User-centered design in the ThinkPad Experience Development. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 14, Sobiesiak, R., Jones, R. J., & Lewis, S. M. (2002). DB2 universal database: A case study of a successful user-centered design program. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction, 14, Vredenburg, K. (1999). Increasing ease of use: Emphasizing organizational transformation, process integration, and method optimization. Communications of the ACM, 42, Vredenburg, K., Isensee, S., & Righi, C. (2002). User-centered design: An integrated approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

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