How Do You Evaluate Design?
A blogpost by Will Zhang
Design is starting to play an increasingly important role in companies; as such, design is starting to attract a lot more attention. We had a chance to learn some knowledge from a design expert on the Alibaba Ucan Conference, and boy, was it inspiring!
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. — Peter Drucker
Usability Evaluation System
UES (Usability Evaluation System) is a design practice from the Alibaba Cloud design center, which has been validated over the course of many years of implementation. It includes 3 parts:
1. Evaluation model of usability from five aspects.
2. Mechanism of experience management from finding problems to being validated of solving problems.
3. A tool set of usability testing and digital management.
Five aspects of the model covering attitude, behavior, system performance:
1. Ease of use
A core aspect of using one product, it reflects whether it is easy to learn and operate, including 3 parts: easy to learn, easy to operate, and clarity.
— How to measure: SUS score.
2. Consistency
All applications in one company or all modules of one product should be consistent, including all the styles, frameworks, components etc. Being consistent could reduce the operating time and error rate, also could reduce the cost of learning, improve the developing efficiency.
— How to measure: Consistency checklist.
3. Happiness
It shows how the product or service meet user’s expectation, which could reflect whether users would recommend it to others.
— How to measure: Survey.
4. Task Success
It includes task completion rate and operation time. Through the comparison between user’s real behavior and the previously designed path, it could help us find problems in the workflow.
— How to measure: Monitor user’s operation behavior on screen.
5. Performance
There are many KPIs to be monitored, but the most important one is the FMP (First meaningful paint), meaning the time from sending out request to getting the data in the console
— How to measure: Performance monitoring.
Digital Management Platform
After validating the model, they tried to apply the model into the publish process of products, they made it a necessary step before the product going online.
They applied this method in their core product ECS, after rounds of iteration based on the model, all UES 5 factors got improved and the NPS score went into a high section. What’s more, they established a platform to monitor all the important KPIs related to the experience, to enable all the stakeholders get a feeling about the strong point and weak point.
In the end, as the expert mentioned, the UES is still in continuous iteration and needs more improvements, we are all looking forward to its new updates and improvements in the future.
Copyright: Some materials and images are from @Alibaba Design and @Alibaba UCAN Design Week.
