How You Could Benefit from Using ISO Standards Nigel Bevan
Abstract
Professional Usability Services
The course explains how international standards for HCI can provide a sound basis for education and training, can provide authority for design and development, and are a rich source of guidance and reference material.
12 King Edwards Gardens London W3 9RG, UK
[email protected]
Author Keywords Standards; usability, user experience; human centred design; process improvement; risk
Introduction Over the last 20 years, industry and academic experts in usability, ergonomics and HCI have met to develop ISO standards containing a wide range of authoritative prerequisites and guidelines for designing, developing, and evaluating usable products [2].
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.
How can one create standards for usability where there are so few absolutes? We all know that usability depends on the context of use, design environment, resources constraints, importance of usability, etc. International standards have resolved these problems in different ways in different areas. The course will clarify the value provided by international standards, and their benefits and limitations. In many cases the standards are more comprehensive than any textbook.
Some Relevant ISO Standards ISO 9241-11 (1998) Guidance on Usability. ISO CD 9241-11 (2015) Usability: Definitions and concepts ISO 9241-151 (2008) Guidance on World Wide Web user interfaces ISO 9241-210 (2008) Human-centred design process for interactive systems. ISO CD 9241-220 (2015) Processes for enabling, executing and assessing human-centred design within organizations ISO/IEC 15288 (2008) System life cycle processes. ISO TR 18529 (2000) Human-centred lifecycle process descriptions. ISO 20282-2 (2013) Usability of consumer products and products for public use Summative test method ISO/IEC 25062 (2006)
Better user interface design The collections of guidelines in ISO standards provide a very good primer for good practice in user interface design. They can also provide authoritative evidence to cite if a user interface design decision is challenged. Interfaces can also be evaluated against the guidelines [1]. Producing reliable usability test data ISO 9241-11 (currently being revised) provides a widely-accepted definition of usability: “The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.” ISO 20282-2 provides a rigorous test method for producing reliable usability test data, and ISO/IEC 25062 provides a means to document summative usability test results to communicate information about usability [5]. Making usability and UX a part of systems engineering Usability has been broadened into the concept quality in use in software quality standards: a high level objective to design a product so that it is effective, efficient, satisfying and risk-free for its users. The basics of the user centred design process have been integrated into the ISO systems engineering standard ISO/IEC 15288. Good practice in user centred design The ISO 9241-210 standard for human-centered design processes for interactive systems is intended as a manager’s guide, and is probably the best concise introduction to usability that is available [4]. (ISO uses the phrase "human centered" rather than "user centered" to acknowledge the importance of stakeholders who may not be users.)
Helping your organisation improve its process ISO TR 18529 (to be replaced by ISO 9241-220) provides the most comprehensive and authoritative definition of the activities needed to implement user centered design, derived from a wide range of sources including surveys of best practice in industry. It can be used as the basis for assessing whether a project has adequately implemented human centered design, or for assessing the usability maturity of an organization. Documenting information about usability ISO/IEC 25064 has recently been developed to define what should be contained in a user needs report, while ISO/IEC 25063 explains what information about the context of use should be identified and documented at different stages of design and development [3].
References [1] Bevan, N. and Spinhof, L. Are guidelines and standards for web usability comprehensive? HumanComputer Interaction, Part I, HCII 2007, SpringerVerlag (2007), 407–419. [2] Bevan, N. International Standards for Usability Should Be More Widely Used. Journal of Usability Studies, 4 (2009), 106-113. www.upassoc.org/upa_publications/jus/ [3] Bevan, N. Using the Common Industry Format to document the context of use. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science 8004, (2013), 281-289. [4] Earthy, J., Sherwood Jones, B., and Bevan, N. The Improvement of Human-Centred Processes - facing the challenge and reaping the benefit of ISO 13407. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 55(4) (2001), 553-585. [5] Theofanos, M., Stanton, B. and Bevan, N. A practical guide to the CIF: Usability Measurements. Interactions, 18(6) (2006), 34-37.
