Interface design issues in the future of business training

Business Horizons, Nov-Dec, 1993 by Elizabeth Boling, Gerald A. Sousa

ISSUES IN INTERFACE DESIGN

The information systems manager or product training specialist who is called upon to evaluate new training packages for a company, or to work with a third-party provider to redesign existing training and information materials to serve new purposes, must be clearly aware of interface issues. We group the interface issues involved in using technology to facilitate distance learning and information delivery into three broad categories: usability issues, social issues for users, and issues of production value.

Usability issues

Usability is often the easiest category to describe and understand, because the microcomputer industry has been exploring it under various names for more than a decade. What makes a product usable? We have all heard much about "user-friendliness," a quality in products that makes them easier to use than products that are not "friendly." What exactly is this quality? How may developers of training and information systems anticipate whether a product will be successful with the majority of people who interact with it?

The former standard method of building usability into a product was to evaluate the best existing products (best being defined as those created by industry leaders, those winning awards, or those that caught the fancy of the evaluators) and distill the features of those products down into checklists (uses color, gives feedback for right answers) for the designers of new products to follow. The problem with this approach is that products are developed for, and used under, a wide variety of conditions by a wide variety of people. In learning situations, as opposed to such supposedly universal applications as database or spreadsheet programs, the characteristics of one group of users may be different in specific ways from those of another. Design solutions that make one product great may simply overload another product, depending on the intended audience and eventual conditions of use.

More current methods of designing for usability rely on several interlocking processes. First is the observation of users before design begins, which involves looking for the problems and advantages of the current process. If one is hoping to quicken the ordering of parts from an assembly floor by replacing a huge, unwieldy catalog with a slick new computerized information system, a little observation will show that the catalog has a few pluses that should not be ignored in the new design. Its pages have edges that can be grasped with dirty fingers, allowing a worker to use the catalog with minimal hand wiping and still leave its data readable. Will the new touch screen computer system be as convenient in this particular way, or will the efficiency it was created to promote be undermined by the difficulty of using it? The second element of designing for usability is to design from principles, not guidelines. A guideline has little regard for the particular circumstances of an individual product, whereas a set of shared principles empowers a development team to make specific, effective decisions for each product. Teams that have worked together for some time in a user-centered approach will create their own set of shared principles. Here is a representative sample from which to start: