Why Performance Always Comes Last in Interactive System Design, and What To Do About It

Abstract

Interactive systems pay their way, ultimately, by enabling people to perform their work better and with less effort. A lot of design ingenuity goes into addressing the “better” requirement, often with the goal of radically changing work practice. Meanwhile, little attention is paid to the “less effort” side — to improving work performance. The main underlying reason is designers’ lack of means to measure whether the performance of work has been improved. This chapter will explain how this has come about, why product usability testing is not the answer, and how the identification of application-specific critical parameters could be crucial, enabling designers to deliver real performance improvements to the user.