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Mary Beth Butler, Ericca Lahti
Lotus Development Corporation
1 Rogers Street, 2 South
Cambridge, MA 02142
(617) 693-5971, (617) 693-4107
mary_beth_butler@crd.lotus.com, ericca_lahti@crd.lotus.com
This demonstration will show how we have built a collection of Lotus Notes databases containing usability results and techniques. Because we have these databases available, we can easily research past testing results, share information on common UI artifacts with geographically dispersed development teams, and efficiently develop strategies for testing new products and features. The intent of this demonstration is to show the characteristics of our system of databases that we find most important for supporting our work, and how our workgroup solution helps us accomplish our goals.
Usability testing, Lotus Notes, groupware.
Usability testing is a well-established technique in many development organizations today. Indeed, many usability organizations have been testing for several years, and have collected substantial bodies of data related to their products and competitive products.
Most PC software products today share common UI elements: these are dictated both by GUI standards (e.g., Windows standards), and, in many cases, by the company's product line standards. Growth of the "suite" market among PC office products requires companies to ensure that their products have common UI elements that work well across the product line. This becomes a particular challenge when development groups are geographically dispersed: ensuring consistency requires a variety of clear communication channels.
In addition, all development organizations face continuing demands to rapidly update their software: for usability organizations, this means finding fast and effective ways to test and deliver results.
At Lotus, we've spent the last several years developing a system of Lotus Notes databases that help us meet all of these challenges: we have organized our findings and methods, and they are quickly accessible to design teams throughout the world. While we have used Lotus Notes to support our system, we think the general model of databases that we have established could be re-created using other workgroup tools.
Lotus Notes is a client-server product that is a combination of a messaging system, a document-management database, and an application-development environment. Lotus Notes provides easy form generation tools, for users with no programming experience. Users can develop "views" of databases to sort and display data in whatever format is appropriate for their needs. Databases can be replicated world-wide, allowing people across the globe to have access to current information in a secure delivery system.
At Lotus, all employees have access to Lotus Notes as both an E-mail and a database package. Lotus Notes databases share similar user interface conventions, so if a user is familiar with one database, she can quickly become accustomed to using other databases. [1]
To support usability testing, and the sharing of usability findings across our company we use a series of related Lotus Notes databases. The most important of these include:
Each product team maintains current product plans on secure databases. While not accessible to the whole company, all product team members, and members of related product teams usually have access. These databases include complete descriptions of all product features, including screen shots of feature elements, such as dialog boxes and menus. Some workflow features are used to indicate versioning of changes to each description. Usability specialists and designers can review specifications of their own and related products to plan usability testing based on these detailed product descriptions.
Usability testing results are stored centrally in one database that is accessible to teams across the company. This database includes copies of test results from testing done at Lotus for the last four years. Test results are categorized for easiest searching; full-text searching is also enabled for more ad-hoc investigations. Usability specialists and product designers can search past testing results to see if usability issues have been addressed in related products, or to investigate issues that should be addressed in upcoming releases of products.
All test results are stored as rich text documents. This allows usability specialists to explain usability findings by including screen shots to illustrate the key points.
This database also contains all test plans, test tasks, and test files for all tests done in the last four years. Having past tests available enables us to re-use plans for efficiency, repeat tests to determine whether usability has been improved by design changes, and use tests from related products as a starting point for planning.
Individual usability specialists maintain databases to track usability issues. These databases are based on a common tracking database template, but are customized to meet the needs of individual products and product teams. Usability specialists use these databases to monitor activities on key usability issues and ensure that these are addressed in the development cycle.
We store detailed information on testing techniques, use of lab equipment, standardized testing forms, and other instructional materials in one central database. This provides a resource to train new usability testing specialists and non-specialists who get involved with testing on special projects.
By continuously recruiting users who are willing to participate in usability testing, we have a ready pool of people to draw on, allowing us to quickly schedule testing. Our subject database includes detailed information on hundreds of users (of both our products and competitive products). We track address information, details about which products testing candidates use, which features they use, and their general level of expertise. We have designed a number of specialized search tools to help us locate users who we know we typically need for testing. This database is also full-text indexed to allow for ad-hoc searches. In addition, we can use this database to track all contact with each user, record testing activity by each user, and generate confirmation letters which can be faxed directly from our desktops, using Lotus Notes, to the user's location.
Lotus Notes databases are well-integrated with rich-text electronic mail. We can easily distribute to pre-established mailing lists either the full text of usability testing reports, or links that enable users to quickly jump to the correct record in the appropriate database. Because the E-mail system is rich-text, we can also conduct on-line discussions of features by including screen shots of feature elements to illustrate the discussion.
Using related and commonly accessible database tools has enabled us to make more efficient use of our usability testing results. Maintaining a well-organized system of results, test plans, and techniques means that we can share information across the company, quickly draw on existing findings to plan areas for future testing, and use existing tools to speed the test development process.
1. Pernice, Kara, and Butler, Mary Beth. Database Support for Usability Testing. Interactions, (January, 1995), 27-31.
Lotus Notes Database Support for Usability Testing / mary_beth_butler@crd.lotus.com
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