Scott Cook's story about Quicken's usability:
http://accountant.intuit.com/practice_resources/accounting/articles/ss_howwuickbookssoftwarestayssouserfriendly.html (cached on Google on 2/11/07)
How QuickBooks Software Stays So User-Friendly
Sandi Smith
Intuit was among the first personal software companies to perform usability testing on one of its products, back in the early days of the company’s existence. Back then, the main product was Quicken® personal financial software. But what is “usability”?
Usability incorporates customer feedback in the development of a product. The goal of usability is to design the product in a way that best meets customers’ needs. In other words, usability helps to ensure that customers can successfully accomplish their tasks in an efficient and pleasant manner. Today, Intuit employs numerous usability engineers who conduct customer research and evaluate products with customer ease of use in mind.
Friendly Benefits
Applying the concept of usability benefits both the business and the customer of the software product. For the business, better usability can increase productivity, sales, and revenue. For the customer, better usability can help to decrease errors, increase success rates, increase accuracy, and increase satisfaction. For both parties, training and support costs and time are lower and development and maintenance time and costs are lower.
The Early Days
In Intuit’s early days, Scott Cook called hundreds of households asking them how they did their finances and what they wanted out of software that would do the bills. People told him they wanted streamlined software that would do simple tasks. They didn’t want complexity: no fancy graphs or advanced features.
Scott contacted mostly affluent households, ones that would be able to own a PC in 1982. He transformed their input into a goal: the software should be easy to use in the hands of the customer, not in his hands or the hands of the software engineer. After designing a prototype, he invited people to use it. He gave them no instruction; he and his team just watched people use the software. From there, his team knew what to fix and retest.
Industry Standards
Over the years, usability research, testing, and design have evolved into an industry and a more formal scientific discipline. Many other software companies now incorporate usability into their product development life cycles. Today, usability engineers are likely to focus on six commonly accepted criteria to characterize usability:
- Learnability: how fast new users can learn to use a system.
- Effectiveness: how many users can successfully complete their tasks.
- Efficiency: how fast experienced users can carry out a task within the software.
- Memorability: once the person learns the system, how long the knowledge stays with them.
- Errors: the percentage of errors compared to the total number of tasks completed.
- Satisfaction: a subjective quality ranked by the user.
Usability goals must take into account differences in the type of task, such as its complexity, frequency, and whether it is mandatory or not, and the experience level of the users, such as whether they are novices, experts, or somewhere in between.
Usability Engineers
Today, Intuit invests heavily in maintaining usability labs and in bringing together usability engineers and software users on a one-to-one basis. For QuickBooks® financial software, volunteer users are asked to complete common tasks, and observed closely by a usability engineer. Their successes – and failures – are carefully documented and analyzed. In many sessions, the volunteers are videotaped as they work and are also observed from behind a one-way mirror. They are encouraged to “think out loud” as they perform their assigned task. Meanwhile, Intuit researchers like usability lab manager Kathy Kim take notes from the other side of the glass.
“We focus on the test subject’s behaviors as they use the product and document problems or barriers they run into while completing an assigned task,” Kathy says. “We then look at ways to alleviate those roadblocks.” The roadblocks can relate to design, process, or even psychological factors.
That data, Kathy adds, is often used in creating enhancements for the next software release.
What Usability Testing Is Not
Usability engineers are quick to point out contrary to popular belief, usability does not involve market research, user focus groups, or surveys. Even the famous “follow-me-home” efforts at Intuit – observing users at home or office, to see how they use Intuit software – are separate from the usability effort.
While Intuit finds all of these activities useful, usability study resides in the careful observing of the user – and in measuring efficiencies.
Critical Tasks
Most of the user tests focus on so-called “critical tasks.” Most people use just five percent of a software product’s features – those features are dubbed “critical tasks,” explains Kaaren Hanson, group manager of user research and best practices group.
“If a product team nails those key features, it’s obviously a huge win for the team, the customers and the company,” Kaaren says. “The goal is to have nine out of every 10 people complete their tasks associated with these key features successfully.”
Usability Program
The Usability Program is a way for users to give feedback to Intuit on their products. The initiative includes its Beta test team. Users can benefit by seeing and testing new features before the general public does and from earning beta points that can be redeemed for prizes. Learn more about Usability Research at Intuit here. You can also get to this section by choosing About Intuit from Intuit’s home page and clicking Beta Testing.
My favorite usability feature in QuickBooks® financial software is being able to type the plus and minus sign to change the date field. What’s yours? Because usability permeates Intuit’s culture and products, you can count on new user-friendly features for years to come.
Editor’s Note: Are you interested in usability testing? Intuit is looking for both existing users as well as those new to the software. Usability tests are conducted at various locations, and perhaps near you. Drop us a note at Usability_D@intuit.com.
Sandi Smith, CPA and technology strategist, is a regular contributor to the Intuit ProConnection Newsletter and can be reached at sandi@sandismith.com.
Last Updated: 07/20/2004
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