Twelve years without a designer’s intervention could be painful for any software interface. Asseco Solutions wanted to improve the usability of their flagship product – SPIN2. It is an ERP software that runs medium-sized and large businesses. Surprisingly we have found that the interface was well adopted by the users and the company did a great job in implementing user feedback. Efficiency was the single topic that needed to be addressed.
We have conducted user observations to better understand the difficulties that users had to tackle on a daily basis. We improved keyboard shortcuts, navigation and significantly simplified the interface while maintaining its functionality.
FIELD STUDY
In order to get a thorough understanding of the software’s usability, we observed users working with the interface for a number of days. Five personas were used to recruit eight respondents that represented the target groups.
Each study session begun with a short interview that uncovered the user’s relationship with the software. For next two hours we have observed the user as a fly on the wall. Our analyst was taking notes carefully to report exposed usability problems.
PREPARATION OF THE REPORT
We used the affinity diagram method, to organize the collected information. The post-its are reshuffled and finally clustered to uncover the relations between different observations.
Recurrent usability problems:
- once clicked, the text in the input field did not highlight entirely as anticipated
- no auto suggestion functionality
- the refresh button had to be pressed in order to refresh the data
- table columns could not be hidden/shown
- error notifications were not easy to understand
- no system status was presented when the system was working
- the widgets weren’t that helpful
We have categorized our findings into 10 different groups:
- user frustrations,
- ergonomy problems,
- did not pass 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design by Jakob Nielsen,
- efficiency problems,
- features highly valued by users,
- workarounds built by users,
- spotted confusions,
- requests for new features,
- software bugs.
ROADMAP WORKSHOP
In order to help Asseco Solutions with the implementation of fixes, we have met in workshops to discuss each finding and identify optimal solutions to the perceived problems. A roadmap has been created to ensure the continuous improvement of the software’s ergonomics.
Made for Asseco in 2012.
