Usability Reporting Document proves to be useful to
industry developers
The recently approved ANSI/INCITS standard, Common
Industry Format (CIF) for Usability Test Reports is already proving
to be an effective vehicle for sharing information between software suppliers
and customers. (Development of the
standard was coordinated with industry by ITL’s Information Access Division.)
Several pilot studies have been conducted which verify the CIF’s usefulness in
improving software design and procurement.
By using the CIF, software suppliers have found a means to learn more
about their customers’ requirements, which allows them to develop products
better suited to their customers’ needs; this is expected to greatly reduce
development time and result in more usable products. In addition, software consumers are learning more about the use
of software in their own organizations and the financial benefits of improving
usability by using the CIF. The initial focus of the pilot studies has been
on software for upgrades, new software products, and custom applications. NIST’s role in the pilot studies has
been to act as a collection and dissemination agent and to facilitate sharing
results from the pilot studies to refine the common usability reporting format
and the associated metrics.
As a result of initial pilot studies, Oracle,
a large supplier of database products,
has standardized on the CIF for reporting usability tests within their company.
The Boeing Desktop Standards Board voted to adopt the CIF as the Boeing
standard for software product usability. Boeing product managers are encouraged
to work proactively with suppliers to begin applying the CIF during the design
stage of product development. The Boeing Company is an international
manufacturing firm that is also a large consumer of software products. In the Oracle/Boeing pilot study, the CIF was used as a
communication vehicle for exchanging user requirements and usability data over
a one-year period. Based on the last
CIF delivered by Oracle, Boeing was able to see that significant usability
improvements had been made resulting in estimates of thousands of dollars
in database administrator productivity. Boeing used this information in making
the decision to renew the Oracle license for future versions of database
software, training, and support.
In another supplier-consumer pilot study, Microsoft and
Boeing collaborated to compare the usability of beta releases of Windows 2000
and an earlier version of this operating system. The effort involved joint design
of web-based survey tools for estimating the effects of improved product
usability. These collected data were used to estimate reduction in the overhead
that results when end-users encounter usability problems. There were
improvements in successive beta versions and an improvement over the usability
of older versions of Windows. Boeing
used this data as input to a decision to upgrade desktop systems to Windows
2000.
Several
European pilot studies have reported the successful use of CIF in usability
requirements for a website, usability requirements for a desktop travel expense
reporting system, assessment of a web site for e-commerce, and assessment of
travel management software.
In
addition to its application for software development and procurement,
extensions to the CIF are currently being considered for reporting usability
testing of hardware, evaluation of web sites, universal accessibility, and as a
means of documenting user requirements. The ANSI/INCITS-approved CIF standard
is currently being proposed to the International Standards Organization, ISO,
to become an international standard.
The
CIF has proven its utility to both of its targeted user group -- usability
professionals and corporate decision makers.
The CIF was developed by the IUSR group, composed of human factors and
software engineers in industry and academia and led by NIST. The ANSI/INCITS
CIF standard can be obtained from ANSI or online from the NIST IUSR web site (http://www.nist.gov/iusr).
Contact: Emile Morse, ext. 8239.