Interaction design

Our colleagues at ‘the product usability weblog‘ have written a nice article about the new ISO standard 20282. Why is this interesting? Because now usability experts have a common platform to judge whether, and to what extent a product is ‘usable’. Said thing is we have to pay for getting the ISO standards, while their goal is to ’standardize’. By limiting the availability their reach is less, and it will take longer before it is a standard, see the paradox? But that is another discussion.

The new ISO is built out of four sections;

• Design requirements for context of use and user characteristics
• Test method for walk-up-and-use products
• Test method for consumer products
• Test method for the installation of consumer products

An especially interesting section was;

“The purpose of the test is to provide a basis for predicting the ease of installation of a consumer product, including measures of its effectiveness and efficiency of installation, and the satisfaction of the intended user population in the intended context of its use”

All usability experts and industry guru’s proclaim that in order to judge the usability you have to test this with users and working prototypes. This ISO claims to have a standard that can ‘predict‘ to which extent ‘ease of installation’ both in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, and satisfaction! I am suspicious that they have developed a standard that can ‘predict’ this. But I haven’t read it so if any has used the new standard I would certainly like to hear your experiences.

See also the original post at userfocus