Usability Home

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Microsoft Usability Group?

The usability group was created in 1988 to bring user-feedback into the design of Microsoft products throughout the development process. Today we have over 40 usability specialists and are still growing. Given the wide variety of Microsoft products, we have sought to maintain a mix of disciplines among our usability specialists. Our backgrounds include human factors psychology, social psychology, industrial engineering, technical communications, developmental psychology, information science and computer science. We have thirteen usability labs and facilities for running focus groups at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Washington.

In June 1989 we opened our first usability lab with four individual test suites, each with a test room and observation room. In 1992 we opened a second usability lab with five test suites. In 1995 we added the Microsoft Home as a usability testing facility. Unlike our traditional test suites, the Microsoft Home is designed as a home simulation with living room, dining room, kitchen, home office and children's play area. In 1996 we added a third lab with five test suites, including a specifically designed ergonomics lab, for evaluating our products from our Consumer Division. While our labs are dedicated spaces designed for easy observation and data collection, we are by no means limited to them. When appropriate, we conduct evaluations in individual's homes, offices, or schools.

The Usability Group has become an integral part of the product design process at Microsoft. Currently most of our usability specialists are located with the product teams they support and participate in and often lead design activities. This result has not occurred through any upper management mandate but by showing product teams the value of user-centered design and providing them with the appropriate skills and information at the appropriate time.

What is usability testing?

Simply put, usability testing is the process of ensuring that software is usable by the people who need to use it. Most of our testing is done in Redmond, WA in usability "labs". We use a wide variety of techniques to collect usability data, including:
• Single-user tests
• Co-discovery sessions
• Paper Prototype testing
• Supportability testing
• Children's product testing
• Hardware (mouse, keyboard, etc.) testing
• Competitive product testing

If you want to know more about our labs, take our virtual tour.

Does usability testing ever occur outside of the usability labs?

Usability testing in the labs is only a part of the usability effort here at Microsoft. Usability specialists use a variety of techniques from field studies to heuristic evaluation to bring user data to all phases of the design process.

Where do you get the usability participants?

We recruit people from the Puget Sound area to spend a few hours at our corporate campus working with products we are developing. Since we are testing software, not people, we are interested in all levels of computer experience ranging from non-user to expert. We also recruit businesses to allow us to visit them on-site to see how people work in real situations. We've expanded our on-site visits nationwide.

Gee, it sounds like fun to be a subject. How can I be one?

If you are interested in participating in a Usability study we can send you a participant questionnaire. Once volunteers return the questionnaire, we put their name in our database. We will call them when we need a test participant matching their background.

What's the difference between usability testing and market research?

Broadly speaking, marketing research and usability overlap in many ways. Both areas often use the same methods, such as focus groups; but they also have distinctive methods, such as user testing in usability research and surveys in market research. Both can also make similar contributions - usability research can help define a product and market research can help identify usability issues with a product.

The following table helps to show the differences between the two areas. You'll note that these differences are more differences of focus rather than differences in kind.



	Usability Research	Market Research
Research population	The end user (the person that will use the product regardless of who purchases it)	The customer (the person or organization that purchases the product)
Key product issue	Ease of user learning and interaction	Customer perception and willingness to purchase
Key research technique	Observing small samples of people using the product	Interviewing large samples of people about a product or functionality
Key focus	What will make the product easy for end users to learn and use?	What will motivate potential customers to buy the product?
Key motivation	How well can end users use the functionality a product provides?	What are customers' wants and desires?
View of the competition	How easy are competitive products to use?	Why people buy competitive products?
Key consumer	Program management	Product management

Are there regional differences in usability?

It depends on what is being measured, but there are probably no important "regional" differences. There may, however, be cultural differences that affect usability in different countries or different areas of the world.

Usability is a general term for a large number of attributes related to the user's performance with computers. Usability testing is a way of measuring these attributes. Some of these measures are related to basic human performance - how quickly can people move the mouse or how visual perception affects user's ability to do a task. At the other end of the spectrum there are measures that can be heavily influenced by culture - how well users recognize an icon or how users format a letter.

For all practical purposes there are no regional differences in human performance. Performance may be affected by practice, but it is unlikely to be affected by location. Higher level measures are heavily influenced by culture. Fortunately, US culture is very homogeneous and so it is unlikely that regional differences will result in differences in usability. However, if we are interested in knowing about higher level tasks across cultures, we think carefully about how cultural issues may affect usability.