SEEK usability engineer works to make technology work for you.
Technology has become ubiquitous in our personal and professional lives, from the internet and web applications, to parallel processing and grid technologies. The ability to communicate and share results has increased by orders of magnitude with the advent of email, the World Wide Web, instant messaging, and other technologies. But the success of all of these new technologies hinges on humans' ability to use the technology to accomplish desired tasks-whether that involves modeling climate change across the globe due to global warming, or entering weekly time charges on the company intranet.
When I was interviewing for the usability engineer position on the Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge (SEEK) project, I was very excited about the opportunity to make technology work for scientists. One of the major goals of the SEEK project and the LNO is to help scientists take advantage of current technology to support their research in new and different ways. And we understand that if technology is frustrating or doesn't help you do what you need to do, you won't use it.
The field of making technology work for people is called "usability," and it is my passion. I'm interested in making sure you can use technology efficiently and effectively to accomplish your tasks and that you have a satisfying experience while doing so. My major goal is to make the technology work for you instead of you having to work to use it.
Many people think usability involves only the user interface of a product. While that is a primary focus, usability is really about the entire product. An application can have a wonderful user interface but lack the necessary features to help you get your work done. Conversely, an application can be full of powerful and useful features, but it won't help you much if the interface isn't designed to let you fully exploit the system internals.
There are many ways to ensure usability. First, usability practitioners apply good design principles developed through years of human factors research. But the primary component is making sure that users of the technology are involved in the requirements, design, and evaluation process. To that end, we might ask you to participate in different activities such as answering questionnaires, becoming involved in focus groups or directed discussions, and performing exercises using prototypes or finished applications so we can determine any usability issues and resolve them.
We want to understand your needs so that we can produce the best tools for you. We may, for example, ask if we can observe you in your working environment for a day to understand the tasks you do daily, the problems you encounter, and the technology you currently use. The more we know about you and your work, the better we can improve existing tools and design new ones that let you fully exploit the power of technology while supporting your research needs and enabling you to conduct new and better science.
We have already put these activities into practice in developing a SEEK product, the Kepler Workflow System. We conducted surveys, basic usability testing, and focus groups at two recent Kepler workshops-during a working group meeting in December 2004 and during an Ecoinformatics training workshop in January 2005. We identified several usability issues, made recommendations for improvements, and collected suggestions for features to be included in future. The cooperation of workshop participants (the users) was essential in all these activities, so the next time someone from LNO asks you to participate in usability activities, you can do so with the knowledge that not only are we working hard to make technology work for scientists, but you are doing your important part in making technology work for yourself and other scientists.
Laura L. Downey
SEEK Project, LNO