The Customer Service Survey
VocaLabs' weblog providing news and commentary on the challenges of providing good customer service.
I Guess I'll Never Be a Scientist.
Wednesday - December 21, 2005 01:54 PM in
I just saw the Speech Technology Magazine article by Ms. Melanie Polkosky titled "What is Speech Usability Anyway?"
Ms. Polkosky is the senior human factors psychologist for IBM Conversational Solutions Group, and she begins her article: "Perhaps one of the great ironies in the field known alternatively as human factors, human-computer interaction, or user-centered design, is that some of its central concepts are exceedingly difficult to define."
Before I read further I had to ask myself: What's so hard about defining usability? With great respect for the several white papers the author has written on the science of human-computer interaction, and the perhaps 1000 words that followed in this article; I was reminded that one way to academic success is to dissect the simple and make the subject sound complex.
I remember a conversation I had a few years ago with a VUI designer when confronted with the fact that an application couldn't detect the spoken difference between San Dimas and San Diego. Her response was: "That's a recognizer issue, not usability. There's noting wrong with the design!" Excuse me? If no one living in San Dimas CA can USE the system; it's a USEability issue.
Defining usability is simple: Any issue (who cares the underlying reason) that impacts the ability to USE the application is useability.
The speech recognition industry has suffered because we allow these academic/scientific distractions from simplicity to take center stage. If the application serves the caller well, it is usable. If it doesn't, there is a usability issue to correct. It really IS that simple.
Posted by Rick Rappe'
Before I read further I had to ask myself: What's so hard about defining usability? With great respect for the several white papers the author has written on the science of human-computer interaction, and the perhaps 1000 words that followed in this article; I was reminded that one way to academic success is to dissect the simple and make the subject sound complex.
I remember a conversation I had a few years ago with a VUI designer when confronted with the fact that an application couldn't detect the spoken difference between San Dimas and San Diego. Her response was: "That's a recognizer issue, not usability. There's noting wrong with the design!" Excuse me? If no one living in San Dimas CA can USE the system; it's a USEability issue.
Defining usability is simple: Any issue (who cares the underlying reason) that impacts the ability to USE the application is useability.
The speech recognition industry has suffered because we allow these academic/scientific distractions from simplicity to take center stage. If the application serves the caller well, it is usable. If it doesn't, there is a usability issue to correct. It really IS that simple.
Posted by Rick Rappe'
Posted at 01:54 PM by | | | |