CONCLUSIONS
These examples may seem very minor, but they added up to a significant
difference for the user. The biggest reason for this success was that the
usability team did not propose large-scale changes to the UI, only small
changes, such things as rearranging icons and rewording dialog boxes. In
usability testing throughout the development cycle, users found that cc:Mail behaved more like users
expected it to than in the previous version. In most cases, changes were
so subtle that users didn't know what had changed, only that it had changed
for the better. They were now able to accomplish the basic tasks.
Creating the Notes
database for tracking usability issues was the single most important
strategy used to convince the team to make changes and accomplish these
measurable usability successes. It provided a reliable source of
quantitative results and was indispensable to this project.
The usability problems and processes described here are surely not novel
to the CHI community. And
yet such apparent usability problems actually existed in a highly
successful best-selling end-user product. It was the judicious application
of well-known UI design principles, combined with a software engineering
tracking methodology, that finally got them fixed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to everyone at Lotus who worked
on this product.
Beginning of Document
Phase 1
|
Phase 2
|
Phase 3
|
Phase 4
Results and Examples
Example 1
|
Example 2
|
Example 3
|
Example 4
|
Example 5
Top of This Page (Conclusions)