IT Usability Survey Tool

Designer / Developer

Project Summary

IT Usability Survey Tool (ITUS) is a survey generator that allows product owners to quickly assess the usability of their applications.

Applied Skills

Interaction Design, User Interface Design, Usability Testing, Rapid Prototyping, Balsamiq, Adobe Suite, HTML5 / CSS3 / Responsive, Bootstrap, AngularJS, C#, SQL Server

IT Usability Survey

Intel IT supports a large amount of enterprise applications to meet the different challenges of day-to-day business at the company. To ensure the majority of these applications were meeting our usability standards, a standardized survey was established. This survey could be used to assess the usability of each application by surveying its user-base with four standardized questions.

Reducing manager workload

The concept and the survey were great but hard to implement across hundreds of applications. It increased the workload for project managers and made comprehensive usability health analysis across IT hard to accomplish. To meet these challenges and streamline the process, I led a team to create an easy to use web application that allows app owners to survey their target audience in seconds. We designed the tool with ease of use and maximum automation in mind.

Demo of ITUS tool - creating and distributing a survey to application users.

For this project, we followed an iterative process. I designed and iterated on a prototype in Balsamiq, which we then tested in several rounds of moderated usability testing. We found the use of the wizard and “good defaults” patterns to be the most suitable for our audience. The design produced low cognitive load and very few user errors. We tested further with a high fidelity version of the prototype which I developed as an Angular Single Page Application (SPA).

Demo of the sixth iteration of our prototype. We tested this with several users before creating a high-fidelity HTML/CSS prototype.

High level of automation

We also implemented a high level of automation to further reduce user input and streamline the experience. This was achieved with the robust Application Programming Interface (API) backend I developed. It allowed for data import and manipulation from multiple enterprise sources, automating processes which were previously done manually. One particular example of that was the automatic exclusion of participants located in certain countries.

Surveying employees from European countries required extra paperwork because of stricter privacy laws. To avoid getting the company in legal trouble, researchers had to manually check their user lists to make the appropriate exclusions. The new system automatically imported and filtered that user data, practically eliminating the need for manual data manipulation. This improved not only efficiency but also user satisfaction. It had never been easier to distribute this survey and acquire usability data.

ITUS tool automatically imported and filtered user data, eliminating the need for manual data manipulation.

The results

Our efforts resulted in an 87% increase in survey completion. There was a significant reduction in time spent administering and analysing surveys. We also observed a reduction in support emails - survey administrators rarely needed any extra help with the new tool. In addition, IT now had a much better view over current usability health among all enterprise applications. This could inform management’s decision making process - what areas of the business needed attention, where should they invest capital and resources.