Functional Specifications Jeopardize Usability?

What if your team spent two months meticulously documenting each and every use case for your product? Specifying each and every interaction users will have with the product to achieve their functional goals?

What if, in addition, your team spent two months meticulously documenting what the user interface will be. Wire frames, screen shots, click-action-response tables, etc.?

Would you end up with a usable product?

Not necessarily. The old adage is that you don't improve what you don't measure. You can specify how a user will use a product all you want, but if you don't define what "usability" means - if you don't measure it- you may not end up with a usable product.

Invest some time defining the usability metrics. How long should it take for newcomer to learn how to use the product? How long should it take for an experienced user to achieve her functional goals? How many user gestures should it take?

Invest some time testing usability. Have your testing team put together a suite of tests that verify the usability of the system against the metrics you defined. Include the key end-to-end usage scenarios that deliver value to the user.

Okay, maybe functional specifications don't themselves jeopardize usability. But spending all your team's time on the functionality of the system without defining usability metrics and testing your product against them is not likely to lead to a usable product.

Comments

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos

Is Customer Development Pseudoscience?

The “Science” of Lean Startup Lean startup practitioners embrace the scientific method, seeking the "truth" about what business model and strategy will lead to product success. We do so by: Formulating hypotheses Crafting and running experiments to test them Learning from the experiments Iteratively feeding our learnings back into revised hypotheses Sounds pretty scientific, at least in spirit, doesn't it? Yet this process actually neglects a key ingredient in the scientists' mode of operation. To identify what’s missing, let’s examine “customer development”. Customer Development Steve Blank is one of the pioneers of the lean startup movement. He introduced into the lean startup lexicon the term “customer development”. Customer development consists of sessions and interactions with customers to test hypotheses. For example, a product manager might interview a prospect, asking if she agrees with the product manager’s hypotheses about the problem

Interaction Design: the Neglected Skill

Your product development organization has a big, gaping hole in it. (Be prepared to feel defensive as you continue reading.) One of the most important roles in product development is the role of interaction designer. An interaction designer designs how the users will interact with the product and conceptualize the tasks they perform. He decides whether, for example, the user interface will be command driven, object oriented (clicking on objects then specifying what to do with them), or wizard based. The interaction designer decides the individual steps in the use cases. Every company has one or more people that play the interaction designer role. Usually, those people have little or no expertise in interaction design. Sadly, they typically don't even realize how unqualified they are. Let's see who typically plays the role at companies. Engineer . An engineer is an expert on building what is designed. Yes, an engineer may know how to design the internal structure of the hardware

Cauvin

Search This Blog