Sept. 24 - User Assessment

1) When/why would you use HTA in designing user interface?

Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) is useful for simple linear or linear/recursive operations (and probably has its roots in the mathematical tool of Formal Decomposition). It is not useful for modeling operations that are subject to interruption, or to parallel or overlapping tasks. When applied to complex tasks, the notation becomes a burdensome mess of deeply nested and looping subtasks.

However, it is useful for getting a detailed look into the tasks and subtasks that serve to achieve a simple goal. It provides a broader perspective than focusing on the function of a specific tool; it is thorough and can reveal the paths and branches for achieving a simple goal across tools and the context in which the tool is used.

2) When/why would you use questionnaires or interview?

Questionnaires are useful for quickly and economically gathering data from a large number of literate users who are willing to voluntarily participate (constrained even more to those who have access to a computer and the internet if the questionnaire is administrated via the web. It is useful for polling user feelings and opinions about things with which they are already familiar and can could help identify the most valuable needs of a community that could be met by a tool.

Interviews serve a similar function as questionnaires, but it is possible for the interviewer to delve further and gather more qualitative information and context, or explore specific scenarios. Interviews go further than surveys at making users feel involved in creating the solution and, in this sense, are also valuable to the design process for the good will they can generate.

3) Do you have any experience either carrying out one of these assessment techniques or being a participant? If so, explain what happened.

One of the clients of the communications agency that I work came to us for help copy-editing their intranet Human Resources webpages. She wished that they would be more easily used by the 11,000 employees. On the call with the client, we learned that the scope of this project would be approximately 60% of the pages in their section of the intranet, or about 3000 documents. A sample of the writing to be fixed didn't help, either - we couldn't see anything obviously wrong with it. Some back-of-the envelope calculations suggested that diving into a full editorial effort would be well into the 6-figures and we still didn't have a clue what we'd be doing. 

I recommended having me down to their offices to  look at their site. After a couple hours of sitting with Jack, their college intern, it was clear that most of the problems weren't the writing but the tool and how it was used. The HR site had been born from the ashes of the HR kiosks installed in the plants in the early '90s and had grown with haphazard and inconsistent upgrades over the last 15 years. 

We hired a usability consultant to do a formal review of the site that involved indirect observation (analyzing the server and help center phone logs) and an expert usability review of the interface, key stakeholder interviews, direct observation of users performing essential tasks such as search, finding HR forms, and locating themselves on the org chart. The study revealed the primary uses of the site, the extreme challenges most individuals had orienting themselves and performing the essential tasks, and provided recommendations for the redevelopment of the site. The findings were sent through the organization and we were invited back to present the findings both to the IT department and to the senior leadership of the HR department. IT has decided to move to the Microsoft SharePoint platform and a global rebuild is in the works. Following this report, some of the key stakeholder communities are very aware of the need to design to the needs of the user.