Company A is a major supplier of specialised telecommunications equipment consisting of circuit boards in small switching cabinets, with a world-wide presence.

Service and maintenance tasks consist of replacing faulty circuit boards in the cabinets by non qualified people. The replacement of the boards must be carried out quickly, efficiently and without risk of error for fear of significant traffic disturbances in large areas. The ergonomics of cabinet, circuit board and plug design become paramount. To assess this, some fourteen-test persons were to exchange faulty circuit boards in a prototype cabinet. An evaluation plan was devised and the usability of the cabinet and associated tasks were evaluated using a performance observation and measurement method and subjective assessment.

The methods used were video recording of the tasks, leading to usability 'bug' analysis, and the assessment of mental effort using the SMEQ questionnaire.

As a result of the usability evaluation of the switching cabinet, usability issues were given more attention within this product area. The usability interest also spread to other related product areas as a result of co-operation and co-ordination. It was however not formalised or integrated in developments processes but was spread and used by people recognising the values and improvements that could be achieved using usability methods.

This usability evaluation is a good example of a rather limited effort giving results that are easy to understand and identifying problems that are easy to correct. In this case the first results led to a re-design of the cabinets but also to a request for more knowledge and help regarding how to take care of usability issues in the future. So making small efforts to provide small-scale success-stories will open doors to a more structured and integrated use of usability. Integration of usability in the development process is still possible and also the further education of designers in usability and usability methods and tools.

This was a good example of a team coming in with only a small input: the suggestion to use the prototype in a realistic scenario to see whether the design goals were being met. The evaluations were extremely un-obtrusive. They took place over a bank holiday weekend, with representative end users specially recruited for the task. Two of the design team devoted their time to supervise the evaluation and to ensure the cabinets worked properly. As a result of watching the edited video footage, all the design team became aware of the problems in the prototype. Such evaluations were easy to carry out - there was no 'back magic' involved and the results were obvious to everyone.

The challenge was to make an impact in a large organisation. A small project near to completion was chosen, and the usability work carried out was small-scale by design. Information about the evaluation spread through the organisation formally, by means of presentations, as well as informally, by hearsay, and members of the original team showing other teCompany A the video footage.

Although usability was frequently spoken about at Corporate, nobody really knew how to get a handle on it, and there was a widespread resistance to changing the company development processes on the basis of theories rather than demonstrated fact. It was a chicken and egg situation: we couldn't get usability in until we'd shown it could work, and we couldn't get it demonstrated until it was 'in.' The small scale demonstration was ideal and its effect reverberated through the organisation for many months after it had finished.

The outside consultants have a long and successful track record of work with the company providing management services not specifically to do with human factors. They were employed for this project because (a) the company needed to introduce human factors, and (b) the consultants had a good human factors reputation and were known internationally for their work in this field. This 'guerilla human factors' approach of 'hit and run' tactics was very effective in this instance. The company saw that their processes were not being compromised, and that the user testing was almost transparent while it happened, although the skilfully-edited video footage afterwards had a lot of currency for a while within the company.

Copyright EMMUS 1999.
Last updated: September 26, 1999.