THE RESULT: GOOD NEWS FOR THE USER

Before long, the developers had implemented several of these usability fixes. Usability testing was then conducted on the revised code. This testing revealed some necessary refinements to areas that had changed. By stressing the fact that these were refinements to existing problems, e.g., a change fixed a big problem but introduced several related smaller problems, not new problems, all but the most technically difficult problems were fixed. Subsequent usability testing convinced the team that the right changes had been made successfully.

Little by little, of the 350 usability issues logged against cc:Mail for Windows, almost one-third of the total got fixed in the "Food and Shelter" release. Table 1 shows the numbers of usability issues that were deferred, and fixed, according to priority. These numbers show that the percentage of fixes increases as the priority increases, demonstrating that usability efforts were focused on improving the most important areas.

Table 1. Usability Issues
Priority    Deferred    Fixed    % Fixed

High           42           53	        56%

Med-High       46           26	        36%

Medium         68           19	        22%

Med-Low	       45            9	        17%

Low    	       40            2	         5%

EXAMPLES

This following pages show a few "Before" and "After" examples of the kinds of UI changes implemented as a result of these usability efforts.

Beginning of Document | Top of This Page (Results and Examples)
Phase 1 | Phase 2 | Phase 3 | Phase 4
Example 1 | Example 2 | Example 3 | Example 4 | Example 5
Conclusions