Providing Excellent Customer Experience Through Usability

Aloha is GSA’s new Authorized Leave & Overtime Help Application. Photo courtesy of Creative Commons and Sam Howzit.

You have to feel for web developers, who sometimes work for months on a product, only to hear gripes and complaints mere seconds after it’s rolled out. Fortunately, you can escape hordes of pitchfork-wielding users by involving users from the start.

That’s what William Wales and his team of developers in Kansas City did when developing GSA’s new leave and attendance system called ALOHA, or Authorized Leave & Overtime Help Application. Calling your web-based leave program ALOHA, and bringing to mind a Pineapple-infused Hawaiian experience was definitely a gutsy move, but justified. When it launched April, I was skeptical but quickly won over.

The interface was so intuitive and usable that minimal if any training was needed to use it. That’s always the goal – to have “walk-up-and-use” usability, just like an ATM.

Achieving this took a lot of work from the ALOHA team. Working with other GSA departments, they identified a wide demographic of users and asked them to help out in a 6 week Pilot. These people had never seen the product and many had little to no technical background – just like most actual users.

And when feedback came back from these pilots, the ALOHA folks (wait for it) actually listened to it! They also sent a link to the program with no instructions to executives, and got blunt and useful feedback. Their goal: Try to keep things as simple as possible for the user, and make choices obvious. Rather than spend weeks making training videos, why not just create a better product? They made some simple training videos anyway, just in case. And they also used surveys, online training via WebEx, focus groups, user interviews and web stats to see what users were doing right, and what stumped them
Testing your system to make sure it works well can go by a lot of names, including:

• Usability testing,
• Functional testing,
• User acceptance testing, and
• System integration testing, to name a few.

But whatever you call your quality assurance process, as long as you keep the end users in mind, you’ll never have villagers storming your castle.