By Birger Agergaard

It takes EU Legislation to ensure Usability, says Standards Committee Chairman.

Although considerable numbers of major companies have departments specialising in usability of ergonomics, busily at work to make new products easier to use, they are very often overruled in the process of preparing the products for the market by the financial department or by designers, who put smart design above functionalism.

Knut Nordby, Chairman of the Technical Committee for Human Factors at the ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute), has seen many cases of good intentions being brushed aside by cool business and trendy design in the telecommunications industry.

Crisp & Clear spoke to Mr. Nordby, who works with Telenor, a major Norwegian telecommunications company, about usability - or Human Factors - in telecommunications.

Nordby has a PhD in psychology and has been working in the standardisation area for 12 years.

"In many companies, it is the financial department that has the last word" says Nordby, illustrating his point with a large-screen phone with e-mail functions recently introduced into Norway: "Numerous steps were skipped along the way, the general view being that there was no time or money for the provision of usability."

Asked why companies even bother to have usability departments, if nobody ever listens to them, Nordby replies caustically: "They are mostly used in cases of complaints."

Tiny Telephones

Another of Knut Nordby’s examples is the development of new desktop telephones, which are apparently growing smaller all the time.

"At a certain point, they were supposed to look almost like pocket calculators with small keys. In the design world, image and elements are often borrowed from other products. But this is a case of borrowing negative design features, which can become a huge problem if designers overdo things based on expectations of they think people may want."

The same situation applies in the mobile phone industry, where the latest products are hardly bigger than matchboxes.

"There are two conflicting interests here: most people would like to have a tiny, smart mobile phone, but, on the other hand, the keys must be big enough for users not to press two keys at the same time. Then the display also has to have a certain size. There’s no way out of the dilemma, unless manufacturers come up with alternatives such as making calls by talking to the telephone."

Abandon Telephone Numbers!

Nordby also mentions that ETSI has established a Special Task Force to look at ways of identifying the people you want to call from your telephone, trying to simplify identification by coming up with an alternative to long numbers. The idea is that it should be possible to type in a name and ask the telephone to search for it – just as you do on the Internet.

"Telephoning habits are changing. It appears that close to 90 percent of all young people make calls from a list of names created in the mobile phone. A logical and easy-to-use search system would be a huge advantage, not least to elderly people," comments Nordby.

Standards for Human Factors

Although the ETSI Human Factors Committee works hard on preparing standards and guidelines to ensure that telecoms products and services are usable, according to its chairman, one tremendous problem is that these standards are voluntary. Says Nordby:

"It is up to manufacturers to decide whether they will comply with our standards or not. EU member states ought to have binding legislation in this area, since we are otherwise running an even higher risk of ending up with an 80/20 society, where 20 percent of the population are left behind".

Commenting that the USA introduced the Telecommunications Act in 1996, which includes penal provisions, and that other EU sectors have issued directives committing member states to legislate, Nordby wonders "Why is this not happening in the ETSI field? It is a good question! I hope it will, but it would require a more targeted lobbying activity, as the EU is also being lobbied by the industry, which wants a minimum of constraints."

And yet when all is said and done, Nordby is optimistic, because part of the industry has started seeing Human Factors as an important element, an attitude that is likely to spread: "Electronic products are often very much alike, and therefore user-friendliness may well become a crucial parameter for competition. Sony, among others, has said that if people are unable to use a certain product, then the product will not be able to compete. So we only have to wait for this attitude to spread among the other big boys…"

Facts

ETSI (the European Telecommunications Standards Institute) is a non-profit making organisation whose mission is to produce the telecommunications standards that will be used for decades to come throughout Europe and beyond.

Although ETSI was established by the EU, it operates independently, using membership subscriptions as its major source of income.

ETSI consists of groups, each with its own field within telecommunications. ETSI TC HF (Human Factors) produces standards, guidelines and reports that set the criteria necessary to ensure the widest possible accessibility of converging information and communications technologies (ICT). It contributes to the following areas (examples of activities in 1999):

• ETSI TC HF completed its work on a new Technical Report (ETSI TR) defining symbols to identify telecommunications facilities for deaf and hard of hearing people
  
  
• ETSI TC HF in 1999 finished an ETSI Guide setting out the ground rules for evaluating the usability of the design of telecommunications services.
  

Published in Crisp & Clear No. 3, October 2000