An Intern's Introduction to Usability

The following is from the interview with IT intern, Ben Walters,  at the conclusion of his internship with Saint Mary’s Press, Summer 2013.

During his internship, Ben, a senior at UW La Crosse,  worked alongside Saint Mary's Press application developer Andy Jandt.

In this interview, Ben shares about his introduction to usability, his experience as an intern, and what he's taking with him as he continues his studies.

Ben Walters

What was your role while you were at the Press?

My role as an IT Intern involved working closely with the members of the Creative Delivery team in order to aid in the development of both new and existing web applications. In addition, I collaborated with a number of individuals throughout the company to gather requirements for several possible software purchases/projects. Finally, I was also involved in the user testing portion of the Saint Mary’s Press Matching Game.

 

When did you first get introduced to usability work?

One of my first projects this summer was to work with Eddy Hale of Western Technical College on the development of a user testing script to determine the effectiveness of a search box located on the Anselm Academic website.

 

How many days were you here before you began doing usability testing?

Probably 4 or 5. It was probably my first week. Andy said that Eddie would be coming in from WTC and he said that we’d be doing some user-testing. I thought, “I have no idea what that means, but I guess I’ll find out….” He had Eddie and I work on the script because he already had one together. He said, “Why don’t you two work together putting together some tasks. At which point, Eddie wrote it down and then we hashed it out. Then we had Andy proofread it.

 

What was it like trying to write a test plan/script?
Not bad, really. Andy was like, “Do the best you can and I’ll help you out.” He’s gone through the training obviously, so I felt more comfortable having his reinforcement saying, “Yeah, this is good,” or “No, this isn’t good.” He had some basis for how to measure that. It was pretty easy.

 

Can you say more about that? What was “easy”?

It just seemed natural to think about what kind of questions would make sense to me if I was being asked these questions. If I was the person that was being tested, it was pretty easy to think, “Well, I would get confused here.”

 

As you were observing the usability tests, you asked a lot of questions. How did you figure out what you were going to ask them?
I think it goes back to what I was saying about how I just put myself in the role of the user, and I sort of did that when I came in for the job interview here. I thought, I know Caren and Andy were sitting in on the interview and Cathy, and I sort of tried to learn a little bit about them via Linked In or something, and just get a better idea of who they were. Obviously, I didn’t have the opportunity when I was (facilitating the test and was) asking Kristi. She came in here and I sort of knew her. There were a lot of things I took from the 5 minutes I had met her before, and I tried to go off of that, I guess. Some people, they need a lot of reinforcement, but then other people, that just annoys them, and I felt like I had to tailor that back to what I knew about the person. So I think in that way, even having the slightest understanding of who that person was really helped. I think if it was a complete stranger, I would err on the side of caution and maybe be at a happy medium.

 

At one point, you did the facilitation of the usability test. What was that like?
That was kind of nerve-wracking just because it was my second or third week and I was like, “Ok, well if I screw this up, I set the standard.” But it was pretty easy—I mean I just had to read the script. It’s kind of like in speech class where you think it’s really easy to read off a piece of paper; well, there’s a lot of other things that go into that, like making sure the person’s comfortable, making sure that they are listening to you. I’ve talked jibberish before and seeing people’s faces kind of change, and I was trying to avoid that.

What cues were you watching for?

Body language, tone of voice, who they’re looking at, if they are making eye contact…

Why does eye contact matter—from your perspective?

I think some people can just do eye contact and talk for hours, but I sometimes have to break away and think and figure out what I’m going to say, so I tried to read what they were doing and maybe build off my own experiences. In the absence of any understanding of who the person is—body language, the way that they were sitting, if they were fidgeting, anything like that—if they are nervous, it tends to mean that you need to be more reinforcing, more supportive, and maybe emphasize that it’s not a test.

Why do you think people think it is a test?

I think maybe it’s just that human subconscious, when sitting in front of a bunch of people you really don’t know, doing something you’ve never done before, and they are just taking notes, and you kind of feel like a rat in a maze. It’s really easy to say, “Well, don’t be worried or don’t psych yourself out,” but I think that’s inevitable. In the case of the memory matching, I don’t feel like I let it affect me too much. I just tried to act naturally, not really hold back, because you guys said, “You know, be completely honest with us.” I wasn’t going to be like, “This sucks,” but this doesn’t make sense. When I got to that screen where it said: 1,2,3,4, and I had no idea, I felt like I could have kept that to myself, or said it aloud, which obviously I did.

How does your experience of this affect how you are going back to school this year?

I don’t know. I’ve always been intrigued or interested by talking with new people, and I feel like I’m a better listener than some people…and not in the way that…I always space out so a lot of things people say goes right through my head, but at the same time I can read body language and I tend to pick up on if someone is uncomfortable or something’s bothering them. They’re not always really good at telling me because they might not know. Having more practice in that makes me more comfortable when I go into another job interview or if I’m giving a speech in front of class.

In work, I can take away a lot of user-testing stuff and apply it strictly TO work, but there’s that interaction with people, encoding what you’re trying to say in such a way that it makes it really easy for the other person to decode. And like I said, building off of if you know who they are, and going off of that, if you don’t know them, gathering as much information as you can with like initial questions.

 

What does that mean, “making it really easy for the other person to decode.”

Perfect example would be, someone’s having trouble logging into their computer, our system’s administrator will go up to them and say, “Ok, do this, this, and this.” Another person who’s not so nice, might say something like, “Well, what do you usually do?” They won’t give them hints, they won’t help them. They’ll just expect them to do it and go from there.

Whereas our system’s administrator will take the extra effort to say, “OK, well what did you try?” Some people do a very good job of making themselves very easy to understand. Other people are kind of cryptic. You have to kind of figure out what they are trying to say. An example would be like an inside joke; if you don’t know the joke, it doesn’t make sense to you. So, I kind of think about what I’m saying to people. Is this an inside joke or is it easy to understand? Is it relatable? Is it something that would make them comfortable, uncomfortable? I think the less work you have to do, the more open you will be to responding.

So what does that mean in terms of what you build and what you work on from an IT perspective?

So right now, I’m working on some parts for PressNet, and in creating those, I have to keep in mind that Cathy will be using them. She’ll be using the HR part. So, I have to keep in mind that—she knows how to use a computer—but she might not have an understanding that Andy (developer) would. I could write a program and Andy could maybe figure it out easier than Cathy would, but I want to make it easy for her to just go in and know immediately what she wants to do and where to do it. And I think that comes with user-centered design kind of where, I mean, Andy could have made the Bible app really cool and really functional and, from a developer’s perspective, it could have been really neat, but from a user perspective, it would have been frustrating and a flop.

Clearly, it’s push 3 buttons and you are in a game. There was that user-centered design in the testing and that’s why it was done. So keeping that in mind and making sure that the things that you do and the products you make aren’t just for yourself—they are for other people. So you need to make sure that the people you’re making them for—it works for them. Everything you do is a service basically; I’m not just making these applications for the heck of it. I mean, I do enjoy it and like that that’s the reward behind it, but the outcome is that it’s going to be used by someone every day, on a regular basis, so you want to make sure that they enjoy using it

Regarding websites being cryptic:

Sometimes there’s not enough on the screen, it’s too simple. Other times, there’s way too much stuff going on at once, and you need to find the happy compromise, especially for your target audience. Like a 7 or 8 year old using that app—they aren’t going to want to push more than 3 squares. They’re not going to want to enter a username or password or anything like that, they just want to go.

As you get older and have more experience with these things, obviously, you can make it more complicated and consequently have more features, but I think the work… it’s not so hard to make a program that does the things that people want it to do. It’s making it easy for them to use it. I think anyone could code a program to display a list of all of the employees at Saint Mary’s Press. Anyone could do that, but making it look good and making it easy to use and understand, that’s kind of a challenge.

How would you approach making sure it looked good and it was easy to use.

I tend to go through 10 iterations of whatever I’m making. The first time, it looks really cool but it doesn’t work very well, and I have no idea how to use it—and I was the one who made it. So that’s when I kind of have to take a step back and say, ok, let me compromise. Let me make it look a little bit better but function a little less complicated, just sort of reeling in on that middle ground.

Is there anything you would say to other students who are in this line of work with you, relating what you learned about user-testing or user-centered design?

It’s hugely advantageous to understand user-centered design, to understand why it’s important. It’s kind of like taking a class and regurgitating the information on a test: if you don’t internalize it, it doesn’t mean anything. If you understand why user-centered design is important and have the practical experience or examples to understanding when someone uses your program, it’s easy for them to use, having that reinforcement, saying, “Ok, this happened when I did that.” That’s much more powerful than just saying, “Well, I was told I should do this, so…”

Is there anything you want to say about your experience as an intern?

Luckily, I had more experience than most people would if hired as an IT intern, in development and the stuff Andy has me doing now. I think he was kind enough to give me those opportunities and find those opportunities, because when I came here, I was really worried that, oh god, I’m going to have to do coding. I suck at math. I'm not a computer scientist, but I found it's something I really like doing. There are a lot of other IT jobs I could be doing, but I've found Andy's job to be really cool. I get something out of it, it's something I've been learning for several years...I get to interact with a lot of different people and it fits my interests and strengths really well. I think that’s what motivates me to want to do it every day.

You had the opportunity to see User Testing in process at different stages of the product's development. What would you say to SMP about what you observed?

Obviously, there’s a formalized process. I understand you guys went to the training and took a lot away from that and that’s pretty obvious when you start getting into it, that you guys have the script out and you kind of know what to expect. But the questions you were asking, making sure that they weren’t redundant, they weren’t leading, you guys were very effective as a group sitting in on the meetings and listening to Eddie and Andy sort of hash out questions and stuff. It was pretty easy to see that Andy had been in a situation where he had asked a question like that and he thought it was a good idea too, but then had the experience and understood that maybe it wasn’t the best question or it could be reworded or it wasn’t relevant.

There’s enough experience that it saved you guys a lot of time and a lot of heartache, I guess, just being open-minded, especially Andy with developing the app, not saying, I know exactly what I want it to look like and exactly how I want it to function. Being really open to change just because it’s something that you want doesn’t mean that’s what the user’s going to want, and I think, I can’t think of a specific example in the Bible app but…

Is there anything you’d like to share about your experience of being an intern? Good experience. Being an intern is not as hard as I thought it would be. Can you say more? I don’t know, interns always get a lot of stink because they are interns. It was just a really rewarding experience; it was like 95% learning, 5% stress. The only time I was ever got stressed was when I was working on a project and I got stuck. I was never stressed because I was doing something I didn’t want to be or because I was working in a place I didn’t want to be working or with people I didn’t like—I never experienced that.

I just felt like you guys were receptive to my wanting to learn because I could have just come in and sat at my desk and not done anything and probably you would have been fine with that too, but the fact was that I would like ask questions and I felt like I was interested in some stuff and you guys didn’t just disregard me. You contributed to my wanting to learn, I guess, and motivated me to want to do that.

It’s even the slightest reinforcement, looking at me when I was speaking in a meeting or something, or establishing credibility. Everyone was really welcoming, obviously, I never felt like I wasn’t welcomed here. That definitely helped with speaking up, accepting there were some things I couldn’t do. Obviously, I couldn’t ask, “Hey, system’s administrator, do you want me to help you set up a server today?”

If I’ve learned anything through college and maybe even this internship, it’s that you can’t do everything; you’ll drive yourself nuts if you try to. I always look for an opportunity to like give back to people who’ve given to me. I mean I’ve had a lot of people throughout my life who’ve motivated me to pursue what I like and enjoyed because if I’m going to be working and doing that for the rest of my life, I should probably want to do it for a while.

What are the overall impressions you are left with from your experience of usability testing?

Overall, I found the experience to be very rewarding! It was really interesting to see how the slightest variations in presentation and script would influence the testers. In addition, it was rewarding to be able to determine the optimal search box position, and to then see that change implemented with confidence. I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to be a part of the testing, as it helped me understand the benefit of user testing in a very practical and relevant context. I can very easily see how usability/user testing is extremely relevant to most projects, and will carry this appreciation forward as I continue to develop through both professional and academic work.

 

Buy and play the game that Ben mentions above:  
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/catholic-childrens-bible-match/id692339017?mt=8