Nigel Bevan on "International Standards for HCI and Usability"

Who would ever have thought that standards for usability would be an interesting topic? Nigel Bevan, a UK-based standards expert, made it so. At the ninth Namahn lecture, he patiently walked the audience through an alphabet soup of ISO and other standards, and explained the different approaches.

In the area of usability, standards can be broadly categorised as shown in the table.

Product use standards describe recommended usability measures such as task time and ergonomics. It is a ‘black box’ approach in that only the resulting usability is measured. In contrast, standards related to the user interface and interaction get into the nitty gritty of icon symbols and functions.

Process quality usability standards apply an approach similar to the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) of software engineering. ISO 15504 (SPICE), for example, defines design capability levels. “In many organisations, first you design the product then you layer on the UI,” says Bevan, “the user-centered approach integrates design for usability into the overall design process and treats it as an integrated whole rather than an afterthought.”

A promising new initiative is the “Common Industry Format (CIF)” developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the US. Suppliers such as IBM, Microsoft, HP and Oracle are providing standard usability test reports to IT purchasers. CIF encourages suppliers to work more closely with purchasers to understand user needs.

Not everyone is happy with usability standardisation, however. According to Bevan, a major consumer electronics company has opposed attempts at usability standardisation for consumer products (ISO DIS 20282: Ease of operation of everyday products), claiming that “the results could be misinterpreted.”

Bevan and the audience agreed that standardisation of consumer products is woefully inadequate; the consumer only really discovers how usable a product is after it has been purchased and by then it’s often too late. So, although much progress has been made, it’s still ‘early days’ for usability standardisation.