Interface Evaluation, Design, and Research at Intel

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Introduction

The USER Lab (User-centered systems engineering and research) was opened in November, 1993. In this short span of time we have been able to influence the way user interface design is carried out at Intel. As in most software companies, user-centered activities first emerged as usability testing which was carried out as the product went out the door. From this initial stage, we have progressed to not only incorporating usability activities into product design and development but into the research activities in the Intel Labs.

Potential products begin as ideas in one of Intel's development (architecture, communications technology, or media) labs. Here Intel engineers build prototypes to demonstrate the potential product to decision makers in the company. During the process of constructing prototypes, designers work with the usability lab to evaluate these prototypes.

Usability is becoming an integral part of Intel's software development process. We have instituted a design for supportability checklist for software development projects and usability is one aspect of this. Usability engineers have much flexibility in how they interact with product groups, depending on the expertise that the product groups already have. Some product groups already have human-computer interaction expertise (human factors specialists, interface designers, and usability specialists) on their teams. In these cases, usability engineers act primarily as evaluators, test designers, and facilitators. In other cases, usability engineers take a more proactive role in evaluating design and recommending design changes. We feel that this flexibility is the key to our initial success. Coming into an existing design process we felt it was imperative to show what we could do but in a nonobtrusive fashion.

USABILITY TESTING

The products we test at Intel can be hardware only, a combination of hardware and software, or software only. This requires usability engineers to design a diverse range of tests. Many of our products do not currently exist in any form in the marketplace. Therefore, establishing usability objectives and doing usability evaluations becomes very challenging.

We work with product groups to provide many types of product evaluation and testing. Services offered include:

1. Task analysis
2. Product concept testing, including metaphor testing
3. Heuristic evaluation
4. User testing, ranging from testing with nonfunctional mockups to complete installation and operation tests
5. Alpha and beta test monitoring
6. Testing of hardware diagnostics

RESEARCH IN USABILITY ACTIVITIES

In addition to our daily activities, the lab conducts product-independent research. We are currently looking at documentation formats, types of tutorials, and the use of video as documentation.

We are also interested in improving our daily process. As such, we are working with researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology on visualization tools for usability data. We hope this will enable us to process data more quickly and with more insight.

We also have a rich suite of tools to use during testing, including:

1. logging tools
2. icon testing tools
3. tools for generating on-line post experiment questionnaires
4. tracking tools to allow us to estimate costs for new products

Our projects for 1995 include remote usability testing, increasing our international usability efforts, developing self-contained packets for icon testing and development, and developing corporate look and feel guidelines.

INTERFACE DESIGN

As a product begins to take shape, it becomes vital to identify user requirements, i.e., what is or will be useful, by understanding completely the context of the work, measures of good and bad performance and the information related to successful performance of the task. We are beginning to use a user goal-based methodology to collect and organize data from users in the field. This method is based on the Functional Information and Knowledge Acquisition framework developed by Gunilla Sundstr*m (1991). We are also working with colleagues in a local company to identify new techniques for making the acquisition of user requirements more accessible to software engineers. The user goals and information requirements then guide product design working closely with usability professionals.

INTERFACE RESEARCH

HCI research at Intel is primarily concerned with investigating and developing software products. The corporation relies heavily on specific research carried out primarily by university researchers. Researchers are invited to Intel to meet with groups who would be potential consumers of their work. These groups work with the researchers to develop grant proposals that, are then evaluated for funding.

We currently support or are interested in supporting, the following areas:

1. Multimedia query facilitators, navigators, and browsers of media (audio, video, text) and mixed media
2. Speech and audio user interfaces, including audio capture and replay, speech recognition, speech synthesis, and uses of non-speech audio
3. On-line help, installation, and tutorials
4. Multi-user conferencing applications, including new applications such as shared editors, existing applications originally designed for single users and converted for shared use

Specifically, we are interested in user interface guidelines, new innovative widgets and controls, and toolkits for developing applications that use one or more of the above.

As we increase our efforts in building communication tools, managers and developers alike have recognized the need for producing usable products. We feel that we have tremendous opportunities and support for building user- centered products at Intel.