Forms Talk

Ask Ms. GeekSpeak

By: Laurie Weaver
Member Columnist

Have you been trying to work with Information Technology, but your initiatives and patience grind to a screeching halt? Do the terms they use sound like so much gobbledygook? Do you ever get the sneaking feeling that IT professionals just may, in fact, have come from Mars? If so, you've probably run headlong into some common "GeekSpeak" roadblocks. The aim of this ongoing column is to help forms professionals and technology professionals overcome roadblocks by gaining mutual understanding, vocabulary, and context. So if you need help with specifics, or if you'd just like to know more about a techie topic, email or post any and all questions to Ask Ms. GeekSpeak. This month's topic: "The Mysterious Black Box"

Dear Ms. GeekSpeak,

A developer I work with mentioned that he doesn’t like “black box” solutions. What does this mean?

This is an interesting question and one we should consider when evaluating technology. “Black box” in software terms means that the end user of the software doesn’t have to know how it works, just what to do to make it work. A real-life analogy to the “black box” concept is driving a car. The driver of the car is like an end user of a piece of software. To start the car, the driver simply needs to know the required process vs. what is actually happening inside the car’s engine.

So, the process to start the car for the driver (end user) might be:

1. Insert the car’s ignition key into the ignition.
2. Turn the key.
3. Press the gas pedal with the right foot simultaneously.

The actual process (inside the black box) might be broadly summarized as follows:

1. The key turning sends electricity to the starter solenoid.
2. This sends power from the battery to the starter motor.
3. The starter motor sucks gas through the carburetor.
4. As the motor turns, spark plugs spark…

I think you get the idea. Unless you are mechanically minded and/or like tinkering with engines, you probably don’t care what is happening when you start the car as long as the car starts when you need it to start.

Simple, right? But what do you do when the car doesn’t start? If you are not a mechanic, what are your options? You might consult the car’s manual to see if it has a troubleshooting section for more information. You might call another person you know who is mechanically minded for advice. You might call the auto club to come assist you or tow you, and so on until your car starting problem is solved.

In the meantime, you may be late for work, stranded or at the very least, tired of dealing with the car!

To recap our example — while you might appreciate that you don’t have to know how the car works in order to start it, lack of that knowledge limits your options and increases the time required to resolve the problem when the car doesn’t start.

Now, let’s apply this to a software concept. You purchase software that comes ready to use “out of the box.” You have instructions on how to use the software, rather like the driver’s manual. You are able to get started right away. Your in-house IT department or developers might be able to configure the software for you in some way according to the instructions that came with the software, but they do not have access to the inner workings of the software. This lack of access is what makes the software a “black box.”

So far so good: the software may be less expensive in time or dollars than custom software, is quick to install and does what you need it to do. The downside becomes more evident if there is a problem, or if the software doesn’t do exactly what your situation requires. A black box solution usually requires the vendor to support it or to extend it — rather like our needing to have our car towed to the dealer to fix our problem instead of to the more convenient corner mechanic.

Most commercial software is black box. For example, Microsoft® Office is a product of Microsoft. Microsoft hires developers, testers, marketers, etc. to make its software product and you buy it off the shelf. If you wish the software behaved differently, or you find a bug, you submit your feature request, or bug report to Microsoft. You then wait and hope the next version will address your issues. The opposite of black box is “open source.” In open source, the code is available to all developers who wish to contribute to it. Usually the software is either free, or a user can send a contribution to the group in charge of maintaining the open software code. An example of open source software is OpenOffice.org. It is a suite of open source products that would be equivalent to Microsoft Office. Open source software usually has frequent updates and users can download the latest version automatically, or when they wish. The downside is that these products may not be as familiar to users, or they may change more rapidly than users are comfortable with. Also, some companies may not like to deal with open source organizations when standardizing software for their workers. They also have to consider the costs associated with user learning curve and support.

On the other hand, developers tend to like the ability to get inside software to “tinker” with functionality, or to understand it with firsthand knowledge. Hence, “black box” solutions are usually not as popular with them.

By the way, Ms. GeekSpeak has no clue about the inner workings of cars and borrowed the engine start summary from an interesting article from howstuffworks.com. If you are so inclined to learn more on that topic, here is the link to the actual article.

As always, if you’d like to know more about black boxes, technical support, the advantages of leather interiors or any other “geeky” word or topic, post here, or email Ask Ms. GeekSpeak

Usability Pitfalls and a Vision for the Future

By: Sandra Thwaites
Cognitive Systems Engineering

This is the third and final installment in the usability series. The first article provided a brief introduction to usability and an exercise to make the concepts more understandable. The second article reviewed the exercise in article one and suggested that the Neilsen’s 10 heuristics of usability might help a team of diverse professionals focus on some meaningful product attributes. This article will touch on two pitfalls of usability and will then address a vision for the future of usability by looking at some independent recent solutions.

TWO PITFALLS OF USABILITY
Usability is both an art and a science. The science elements include research methodology and statistics (e.g., concept of samples). The art includes good intuition about which usability evaluation method is best for a given situation and selecting the best core tasks for testing.  Two of the many pitfalls of usability are (1) evaluator or tester bias and (2) sample size or the number of subjects required for usability testing. 

Pitfall 1: Evaluator Effect
Since there is an ‘art’ element to usability, it should not be surprising that researchers have documented an ‘evaluator effect’. Hertzum and Jacobsen in 2003  and Jacobsen in 1998 are two papers that discuss the evaluator effect. Both reported that across practitioners there is a great deal of variation in the usability evaluation methods selected for a given usability test. Similarly, they found a great deal of variation in what practitioners identify as usability issues during testing. This was the case regardless of the practitioners' experience level! 

Findings of a so-called evaluator effect are, however, perhaps nothing more than validation for the tenant of psychology that says "all people are different."  Is there any profession in which all practitioners practice the same way? Medicine? Auto Mechanics? What seems essential is a trusting relationship between the buyer of the usability work and the usability professional. Usability professionals must be able to communicate their work and, if necessary, justifications for the way in which they will do that work.

Pitfall 2: Test Subject Sample Size issue
Recently, there has been controversy over the general rule that one need test only 5 to 7 subjects when examining usability. An article by Turner, Lewis and Nielsen in 2006 details calculations for determining the appropriate usability test sample size. They suggest that 5 to 7 subjects are sufficient provided that one is interested in finding only 4 usability problems.

In 2003, Carol Barnham  published a more accessible paper in the STC Usability SIG Newsletter, entitled “What’s in a Number?” trying to resolve the issue of whether 5 to 7 subjects are enough for usability testing.  Barnham concludes that the initial proposal of using 5 to 7 subjects is part of the “discount” method of usability. It makes usability testing affordable and is acceptable provided it follows the iterative (i.e., test-redesign-retest) method of development. This means that usability testing is meant to be done on more than one occasion during development.

A VISION FOR THE FUTURE OF USABILITY
If you think that usability is only about making screen-based interfaces work better, think again.  Usability principles are applied, or should be applied, to every service and product development.  Neither of the examples below relates to interface screens, but all clearly show the impact of usability.   

Getting usability out into the world at large is one grand hope this author has for the future. A few recent examples seem to hold the promise that usability can help make the world a more joyous and usable place.

Piano Stairs
One prime example of a noteworthy solution is the recent “piano stairs” project in Sweden. The video went ‘viral’ and shows a subway exit in Sweden, noting that most people exit via the escalator rather than the stairs. In an effort to get more people to use the stairs, they were turned into a piano of sorts.  Each stair emits a specific and different piano key sound when stepped on. There are even sharps and flats (black keys) positioned to one side of the stairs.

The video shows curious subway passengers noticing and trying-out the “new” stairs when exiting the subway. The video informs us that 66% more people take the stairs, after they were transformed into ‘piano stairs’. And, it is easy to see that the people using the stairs appear to be having a lot of fun. At the end of the video, we learn that Volkswagon sponsored this “experiment,” stating that "We believe that the easiest way to change people's behavior for the better is by making it fun to do."  This is usability at work.

Other projects are listed on the piano stairs link above such as the Merry-go-round pump project in Africa. Clean water is pumped from the ground as a result of children playing on a merry-go-round. This is another example of how ‘chores’ can be made to be fun. Video games are made to be fun and there is certainly no reason why other products and services should not also have fun as one of the usability goals. As long as someone on the development team is creative and can find a way to tie fun to the corporate bottom line then we can expect to see more fun in future products and services.

The Red Paperclip
Another story which received quite a lot of press, in Canada at least, became known as “the red paperclip”. A creative young man in his twenties had managed to trade-up his large red paperclip for a house! As stated succinctly on the individual’s website: “My name is Kyle MacDonald and I traded one red paperclip for a house. I started with one red paperclip on July 12 2005 and 14 trades later, on July 12, 2006 I traded with the Town of Kipling Saskatchewan for a house located at 503 Main Street.”  After two years of living in his house in a small Saskatchewan town, Kyle is apparently now eager to receive trade offers for his house.

The red paperclip story is just more proof that out of the box thinking can result in unbelievable things. As we move forward into the post credit crunch world of the unknown, it will take out of the box thinking and brave fresh minds to explore new avenues. Mankind can certainly do with projects that are more fun, more peaceful, more joyous, more healthful.

Usability is useless alone. It relies on visionaries and designers to spawn ideas. Together we can work on usability goals like sustainability, simplicity, fun, peacefulness, and neighborliness. Usability might just be a mindset and part of a consciousness ready to breathe. It is this author’s hope that the usability of tomorrow can play a role in unfolding a new, sustainable world.

Ask Ms. GeekSpeak

By: Laurie Weaver
Member Columnist

Have you been trying to work with Information Technology, but your initiatives and patience grind to a screeching halt? Do the terms they use sound like so much gobbledygook? Do you ever get the sneaking feeling that IT professionals just may, in fact, have come from Mars? If so, you've probably run headlong into some common "GeekSpeak" roadblocks. The aim of this ongoing column is to help forms professionals and technology professionals overcome roadblocks by gaining mutual understanding, vocabulary, and context. So if you need help with specifics, or if you'd just like to know more about a techie topic, email or post any and all questions to Ask Ms. GeekSpeak. This month's topic: "Cookies"

Dear Ms. GeekSpeak,

In your last column, you mentioned cookies. I’ve always heard of them, but what exactly are cookies?

Cookies can be confusing. For example, if you search wikipedia.org for “cookie,” you will discover that a cookie is a small, flat-baked treat, containing milk, flour, eggs, sugar, etc. But since you asked Ms. GeekSpeak, and not Ms. BakeSpeak, I’m betting that you want to know about the computer variety. To get some of this information out of wikipedia.org, try seaching again, but put “HTTP” in front of the word “cookie.” Ah, now we’re cooking.

Why does Wikipedia need to see “HTTP” as part of the search term to give you the correct cookie definition? It’s probably because “HTTP,” which stands for "Hypertext Transfer Protocol," is the means that Web servers use to make requests to a user’s browser software, and that’s where our computer cookies come from.

Computer cookies are actually tiny text files that are left on your computer when you browse a website. Cookies are not programs. They don’t do anything in and of themselves. When you visit a website, the server software will ask the browser software via HTTP to check to see if you already have a text “cookie” file that the server has set in the past. If you don’t have the requested cookie, the Web server will tell your browser to save a new one on your computer. If you do have the cookie, the text data the cookie contains will be sent back to the requesting Web server.

What kinds of things does the server software do with the information? A website might read saved items from your cookie file such as your sign-in name and password, so that you don't have to sign in each time you go to a particular site. They might also store lists such as what items you have placed in your online shopping cart. More and more, online advertisers also use cookies to track where you visit online and to send “personalized” ads your way. Many folks, including Ms. GeekSpeak, find this policy intrusive, but the cookies themselves won’t harm you.

It’s a decision for each of us: Is the convenience of not having to re-enter the same information into websites that one visits regularly worth the privacy loss of targeted advertising? If you find yourself not wanting to have cookies on your computer, almost all browser software has an option to turn off cookies or delete cookies. Also, most anti-virus software will remove or quarantine cookies from ad companies. Be aware, however, that if you disable cookies, your Web browsing experience will not be as automatic as with the cookies in place.

For more about actually baking … er, making computer cookies, here’s a fun article that is more in-depth about the code itself.

http://www.quirksmode.org/js/cookies.html

As always, if you’d like to know more about cookies, code, chocolate chips or any other “geeky” word or topic, post here, or email Ask Ms. GeekSpeak

Usability: Exercise Review and Using Heuristics

By: Sandra Thwaites
Cognitive Systems Engineering

This is the second of three articles on usability. The current article reviews the usability exercise presented in Part 1 of this series from the September issue of FormsTalk. Part of this review will reiterate and elaborate on the importance of usability heuristics, or “rules of thumb,” as the guideposts of “good” design. The remainder of the article will touch upon some recent electronic forms revamping done in Norway  on  the ELMER project and in Australia  with CentreLink. One key take-away point from this article is that design heuristics may be used to help structure and stimulate discussion among the various members of a (re)design team, regardless of the product being developed.

Exercise Review of GroceriesOnline.com
In Part 1, readers were invited to try to complete an informal usability test of an initial screen design for OnlineGroceries.com. That screen design is reproduced in Figure 1. With this screen, prospective users of the site were to be asked how they think they would go about purchasing three (3) items: bananas, bar-b-q tongs, and a large watermelon.

The reader was asked to play the role of usability tester. This required them to specify one or more usability goals for the site, develop and administer a test protocol to prospective users (subjects), record and analyze the data or Subject’s behaviour when trying to complete the buying tasks, and finally, at least two key recommendations were to be made in order to create a better design for the website.

Figure 1: Material for Usability testing (kindly provided by Lise Whitewolf and Hilary Little, User Interface Designers, CBSA, as part of a lunch-and-learn exercise Summer, 2009)

As far as site goals for GroceriesOnline.com, the following list contains some possible goals that might be of interest to the owner and other stakeholders.

• (Potential) Customers should find the site visually appealing,

• (Potential) Customers should rate the user experience of the site higher than the experience of shopping in a grocery store,

• (Potential) Customers should be able to order 10 grocery items in three minutes or less, making no more than two errors from which they can quickly recover

• (Potential) Customers must rate their nth time usage of the site as a 6 or 7 on a 7 point satisfaction scale which is as good as or better than the rating they gave after their first time usage. In other words, the site must be designed for the expert user given that one business goal is to have repeat customers.

Anyone who took the time to complete the exercise, with only themselves or with a sample of other individuals, should have noted many, many diverse and serious usability issues with the initial screen design. Those issues include:

• How to see what one is currently putting in their cart versus what is already in their cart

• A way to delete an item from the order

• A way to save the order in case they want another exact one in the future

• No apparent way to purchase multiples of an item (e.g. 1 banana versus 5 bananas)

• Confusion over the information on the Details screen (e.g. number of bananas in a “bunch”); watermelon, oranges and bananas being on the Vegetables tab

• Confusion regarding the categorization of items at GroceriesOnline.com as seen on the left and right tabs: why is there a tab for “Desserts” on both the left and right hand sides of the screen?

• Difficulty or length of time to find items listed by adjectives (e.g., “seedless mini watermelon” versus “watermelon – seedless mini”)

• What is the meaning of the link Save to my shopping list?

• Is the ON SALE! link the same as the Specials link?

These are just some of the many critical and major problems with this first design of a website page for the GroceriesOnline.com. For those readers who took the time to test multiple “prospective” users, you should have noted a pattern or repetition in the types of errors after about the first four (4) Subjects.

Your redesign recommendations should have been based on your findings. While the author cannot predict all of your recommendations, some of your top recommendations might be:

• Include actual pictures of the products in the design to facilitate locating items to purchase and to inform users as to the quality of product they can expect to receive.

• Have people on the project team play the role of information architects to take another look at the categorization labels being used on the tabs.

• List items by noun first (e.g., “watermelon – seedless mini” versus “seedless mini watermelon”).

• Invite the owners to reconsider whether they want to sell more than groceries and/or change the name of the website to better reflect its offerings.

While common sense, your online experiences, grocery shopping in a store, and your expectations were probably used during this exercise, there is a more scientifically established way to complete a product review when there are insufficient resources to undertake a usability test. Specifically, use Jacob Nielsen’s (1994) 10 heuristics of good user interface design to review a product.

As mentioned, Neilsen’s heuristics can be used to subjectively but rigorously review an application when resources preclude the testing of Subjects. While a heuristic review is better than no review, it is rarely as good as an actual usability test wherein at least 5 to 7 Subjects are tested with a design. Simply put, no matter how skilled an individual reviewer is, he or she can rarely predict with 100% accuracy what different users will do when faced with a given design.

Nielsen calls the 10 items “"heuristics" because they are more in the nature of rules of thumb than specific usability guidelines.” In alphabetical order the heuristics are:

1. Aesthetic and minimalist design
Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.

2. Consistency and standards
Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.

3. Error prevention
Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.

4. Flexibility and efficiency of use
Accelerators -- unseen by the novice user -- may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.

5. Help and documentation
Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user's task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.

6. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.

7. Match between system and the real world
The system should speak the users' language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.

8. Recognition rather than recall
Minimize the user's memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.

9. User control and freedom
Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.

10. Visibility of system status
The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.

The skill of the interface designer is partly in coming up with designs that balance out these ten heuristics to create the most usable interface design. More often than not however, the final design solution will be biased towards one or more specific heuristics, possibly differing across application features. For example, the interface design for feature x might be weighted towards heuristics #1 and #9, while the interface for feature y might be weighted towards heuristics #2 and #7.

The author has recently and successfully used a mapping of tasks by the 10 heuristics for interface design. Table 1 presents an example of such a mapping, using hypothetical high level tasks. Early in the development process when only vague product requirements and high level tasks are known, this mapping can be done to serve as a:

• high level roadmap for the interface design process, and

• checklist" against which design options can be assessed.

10 HEURISTICS OF GOOD INTERFACE DESIGN

Table 1: Sample mapping of fictitious High Level tasks to the 10 Heuristics of Good Interface Design
Note: Black fill denotes the critical importance of that heuristic in the final design solution for the corresponding feature. Gray fill denotes importance.

Table1 is essentially showing where the risk is in failing to design usability into features that support the various high level tasks. While such a table is of great importance to the user interface designer and usability specialist, it can also benefit other players in a large project, such as the business team. The mapping, combined with a discussion of the value and risks of failing to consider usability, provide a good basis for discussion between the various groups involved in product development.

In the case of forms design, ELMER and Centrelink are two projects that have spawned guidelines and principles for forms development.

Guidelines & Principles for Forms Design: The ELMER & Centrelink Projects

The ELMER (Nygaard, 2009) and Centrelink (Barnett, 2009) projects are two examples of Governments spending significant resources to develop principles to significantly improve the usability of their internet forms.

ELMER (a Norwegian acronym for “easier and more efficient reporting”) is a set of principles and specifications for web forms now at Version 2. Like most Government agencies in the world, Norway was spending “huge amounts of money to explain questions on forms to users and to fix the mistakes they make” (Nygaard, 2009). Many varied professionals worked together to develop the ELMER guidelines, found at www.brreg.no/elmer/elmer2-english. These guidelines deal with layout specifications as well as the user interface. An example of the latter is, “The choices available for checkboxes, radio buttons and pull-down lists must use a wording that is meaningful for the user”.  The application of the ELMER guidelines within Norwegian Government agencies has resulted in an impressive 90% of important business-related forms now being submitted through the web rather than their paper-based alternatives.

In 2006, the Australian Minister for Human Services, Joe Hockey, declared that something had to be done with forms, as their typical error rates of 80-100% were costing millions of dollars per year to correct (Barnett, 2009). Centrelink is an agency handling social security, veteran, and similar types of payments in Australia.

A set of principles for forms design were developed through the Centrelink project by relying on, in part, error analysis and usability research. Centrelink principles deal with proven design and language techniques. The use of usability testing was deemed most positive as it helped to provide objective data on the goodness of design options thus reducing the opinion fighting around changing someone else’s design.

Both Nygaard (2009) and Barnett (2009) suggest that principles or guidelines can provide a cohesive focus for all involved in the (re)design of forms. Similarly, usability heuristics help with discussion when the various stakeholders within a project are considering design options.

The final paper in this usability series will discuss some of the pitfalls of usability as well as some thoughts on where usability is heading.

REFERENCES
Barnett, Robert, “Redesigning Centrelink Forms; A Case Study of Government Forms”, User Experience, Vol. 8 (2), 2nd Quarter 2009, www.UsabilityProfessionals.org

Nygaard, Tor, “The ELMER Experience: A standard for Government Forms”, User Experience, Vol. 8 (2), 2nd Quarter 2009, www.UsabilityProfessionals.org

Neilsen, Jakob 10 Heuristics of Good User Interface Design, http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html, 1994

Ask Ms. GeekSpeak

By: Laurie Weaver
Member Columnist

Have you been trying to work with Information Technology, but your initiatives and patience grind to a screeching halt? Do the terms they use sound like so much gobbledygook? Do you ever get the sneaking feeling that IT professionals just may, in fact, have come from Mars? If so, you've probably run headlong into some common "GeekSpeak" roadblocks. The aim of this ongoing column is to help forms professionals and technology professionals overcome roadblocks by gaining mutual understanding, vocabulary, and context. So if you need help with specifics, or if you'd just like to know more about a techie topic, email or post any and all questions to Ask Ms. GeekSpeak. This month's topic: "Sessions 101."

Dear Ms. GeekSpeak, my Web developer talks about session data. What does this mean?

First of all, congrats on your relationship with your Web developer. If he or she assumes you know about session data, there must be a perception that you are pretty tech-savvy already!

Let’s start exploring some broad-based technical concepts about servers, websites, clients and sessions using a non-technical world analogy. In our analogy we will compare servers to waiters, websites to restaurants, clients to restaurant customers and sessions to a customer’s dining experience. With me so far? Our customer (client) enters a particular restaurant (website) and summons the waiter (server). The customer and the waiter will probably have several interactions: the customer may order food from the waiter, ask questions, take food, return food, pay the bill (or not) before finally leaving the restaurant (ending the session). It is important to note that several other customers will also be interacting with the waiter during our example of a customer’s time at that restaurant — each one having a distinct dining experience (session).

This is also what happens when you use a particular software application to browse the Web. You are using this particular software at this time to interact with this particular website. Everything that goes on between your browsing software and the website server from the time you navigate to the website until the time you leave the website is known as a session. Remember all of the other customers at the restaurant? Each instance of a browser navigating to and interacting with the same website is also a session.

So what would happen in our real-world example if our waiter (server) didn’t write down who ordered what? What if you wanted to add dessert onto your particular order, but the waiter just went from customer to customer bringing food and bills at random?

Okay, okay, I’m stretching my analogy a bit thin, but bear with me. There are reasons for a website needing to know which client is which during a session. These might include allowing users to add items to an online shopping cart, allowing a user to save preferences for when he or she returns to the site and understanding their customers’ browsing habits. Methods for saving session data can be on the client side (text stored on your computer via “cookies”), or on the server side (user information stored in a database by user ID). Both of these are fine topics for another day, but if you can’t wait, here are a few links to “have a session with.”

How Cookies Work

Methods for session tracking

Next time you go out to eat and your waiter comes over, think of the “server” and you will be well on your way to getting the hang of sessions. As always, if you’d like to know more about sessions, cookies, clients, fine dining or any other “geeky” word or topic, post here, or Ask Ms. GeekSpeak.

Usability Series: Overview and Exercise

By Sandra Thwaites
Cognitive Systems Engineering

This is the first of three articles on usability. The current article includes a basic overview of usability and an exercise in usability testing. The author believes that going through this exercise will give readers a better appreciation for the steps involved in usability and the value that it provides. You can reach Sandra at thwaites@magma.ca.

WHAT IS USABILITY?
Usability can be defined as the ease with which the intended group of users can interact with or use a product to achieve something the product is designed to do. More broadly speaking, usability contributes to the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ user experience of a product.

Usability is most typically done when development follows a user-oriented, iterative design approach. The product being developed is anything that has a human interaction component. Instances of such products may include services offered on a website, an insurance company application for approving clients for insurance, an electronic thermometer for infants, a vote ballot, or take-out cup and lid for hot liquids.

The term “user-oriented” means there is a belief in the value of including the users’ needs in the product design, along with business needs and technology. The value of usability is easiest to see when there is a strong correlation between business needs and user needs. For example, the business may need to increase sales by 10% (e.g., of cell phones) and users may be more willing to purchase that company’s product if it enables users to ‘easily’ accomplish some core task (e.g., send text messages).

Iterative development essentially follows these steps:

1. design
2. usability test
3. refine design if indicated
4. repeat until the usability goal(s) is met.

Usability goals should be specified for a product as soon as possible and a priori, that is,  before any testing is done and any results are known. Stating usability goals, or destinations, before testing helps to avoid the tendency for people to argue about whether the results of testing indicate the design is 'good enough' to release the product to market. By specifying goals a priori, before testing begins, then the decision to reiterate or evolve product design will be based on fact (testing results) rather than opinion.

Usability goals deal with either performance or subjective opinion. Performance ultimately comes down to the speed and errors that result in order to accomplish a task. It may be easiest to set a usability goal in cases where user performance levels with a product will result in life or death for the users or other individuals. In the case of a radiation machine for example, a usability goal may be that an acceptable or good enough design will be one that results in zero patient deaths after a user administers radiation with the machine. (Set Phasers on Stun, by Steven Casey, presents true stories of interface designs with deadly consequences, including one story about a radiation machine: http://www.aegeanpublishing.com/phaser1.html)

Most products will not result in life or death but rather will enable users to complete a task ‘quickly’, ‘more slowly’, ‘with a few errors’ or ‘with many errors’. These high level statements of usability goals need to be “operationalized” or stated in a way that makes them measurable. Examples of measurable statements for usability goals include: users will perform all core tasks in 5 minutes or less; users will complete all core tasks at a level of satisfaction that is 2 points higher than the satisfaction rating for the way they currently complete the core tasks. Another example is a goal which states that core task x will be completed in less than 2 minutes while the other core tasks will be completed in less than 5.5 minutes.

Subjective usability goals may be of interest instead of or in addition to performance usability goals. Subjective goals relate to ratings on say a 5 point scale Subjects give in response to opinion statements. For example, a subjective usability goal may be that Subjects rate the product 4 or higher on a scale of perceived ease-of-use (e.g., I find the product easy to use).

WHAT KIND OF PEOPLE ARE USABILITY PROFESSIONALS?
Usability specialists come from a variety of backgrounds but all hold the common desire to contribute to the development of products that are usable; products that enable users to accomplish a specific task(s). This author has a background in Cognitive Psychology as well as several years in a doctoral Human Oriented Technology program within a Psychology Department. Skills the author believes to be invaluable include an understanding of research methods, statistics, limitations and strengths of the human brain, and the ability to be an objective observer.

Relevant courses are available at many universities as well as online.

WHEN DOES USABILITY TESTING OCCUR DURING DEVELOPMENT?
Usability testing is ideally done early and often. Testing can begin as soon as one has an idea for a product. At the idea or conceptual phase, testing would likely take the form of a focus group where opinions and visions for the product idea are voiced by participants.

Beyond the conceptual phase, a user interface designer will be able to provide some rough sketches for the proposed product. Early sketches fall into the category of “low fidelity” and can be tested with potential users to provide invaluable feedback on whether these high level designs make sense to the user. Still later in the process, designers and/or developers will be able to deliver a partially-functioning or high-fidelity prototype. Typically, such a prototype will only be functioning for a specific set of core tasks that the product is to support.

Testing early means that one can essentially get the design ‘good enough’ before any expensive and costly-to-change programming has begun.

WHO ARE THE TEST SUBJECTS?
Usability testing can be done on 5 to 7 Subjects who are representative of the target user population. More often than not, Subjects are tested one at a time on a set of tasks that can be completed in approximately one hour.

It is important that Subjects understand that it is the product that is being tested rather than them. Perhaps the most difficult part of testing is reminding the Subject to think aloud. The object of the testing is usually to collect qualitative data. The tester needs to know and note what the Subject is doing or trying to do and understand their reasons for anticipating any interaction behaviours. Thinking aloud is a foreign concept to most people and so the tester needs to gently and frequently prod the Subject to continue to think aloud.

WHAT IS THE TEST PROTOCOL?
The usability specialist needs to devise a protocol which lays out the tasks for the Subject to try and complete with the prototype materials. These tasks should represent the core tasks that the product is designed to do.

It is common for a Usability specialist to run one or two ‘pilot’ or practice Subjects to try and gain an appreciation for where common interface issues might be for Subjects. In this way, the specialist can be prepared with a series of hints to try and help the Subject complete a task.

Writing everything down in a protocol better ensures that every Subject will be run through the test in the same way.

ANALYZING TEST RESULTS
For each task, the problems that Subjects encounter during a usability test may be categorized as a Critical, Major, or Minor problem according to the following definitions:

Critical: User cannot complete the task because it is not possible with the current interface or because they do not know how.
Major: User experiences great difficulty completing the task. They may commit many errors and require several hints to be able to complete the task.
Minor: User completes the task but is annoyed along the way with specific elements of the interface as indicated by comments to that effect or facial expressions of annoyance.

One wants to focus on common problems found during usability testing. That is, problems which are repeated for almost every Subject. It is necessary to test representative Subjects because it is impossible, even for a seasoned usability professional, to predict 100% accurately where exactly users will have problems with an interface. When testing is done by a usability practitioner alone without any Subjects, it is called a Heuristic Evaluation. While this Heuristic Evaluation is better than doing no Usability testing, it is generally inferior to the results that will be found through testing a representative sample of Subjects.

From the analysis, the usability practitioner must pinpoint problems with the current interface design and make recommendations for the way in which that design needs to be changed to better meet the users mental model or understanding of how the application works.

THE EXERCISE
This exercise is designed to be simplistic and will hopefully provide the reader with an opportunity to perform a usability test on 5 to 7 people.

The material to be usability tested is presented in Figure 1 which is a first pass sketch of a website for a company called GroceriesOnline.com. Assume that this is a new yet to be launched website intended for local users. The owners of the company believe that this design is sufficient to allow their potential customers to order such things as

1. Bananas
2. Bar-b-q tongs
3. Large watermelon

Your tasks are to:

1. Set one or more usability goals.
2. Develop a test protocol whereby each Subject must tell you how they would order large bananas, bar-b-que tongs and large watermelon. The test protocol needs to be further specified.
3. Run yourself as a pilot Subject to get a feel for what might happen during actual testing.
4. Run 5 to 7 Subjects through the test.
5. Record & analyze your data.
6. Make at least two key recommendations for creating a better design for the website.

Figure 1: Material for Usability testing (kindly provided by Lise Whitewolf and Hilary Little, User Interface Designers, CBSA, as part of a lunch-and-learn exercise Summer, 2009)

Usability is an art and a science and, like anything, improves with practice. You are bound to learn something by going through this exercise and may even find yourself eager to usability test some of your own designs.

The collective results of many usability studies have resulted in the development of standards of best practice for design. Nevertheless we must not forget that the best design for today’s technology will be replaced with a design more suited to tomorrow’s technology. This point is underscored by a recent study in The BBC Magazine. They marked the 30th anniversary of the Sony Walkman by inviting a 13 year-old boy to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week. Some of the boy’s comments included, “It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape!”

The entire article can be found at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8117619.stm

The next article in this series will discuss some of the many issues with the initial GrocerersOnline.com website design. Additionally, the second article will discuss some publicly available usability work, noting some key elements to further expand your understanding of usability.

SOME CLASSIC BOOKS & A WEBSITE ON USABILITY
Bias, Randolph G. & Mayhew, Deorah (Eds.), Cost Justifying Usability, Elsevier, 2005.
Krug, Steve & Black, Roger, Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, New Riders Publishing, 2000.
Nielsen, Jakob, www.UseIt.com
Nielsen, Jakob, www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html (10 principles of good interface design)
Nielsen, Jakob, Usability Engineering, Morgan Kaufmann, 2001.
Norman, Donald, The Design of Everyday Things, The MIT Press, 1998.
Rubin, Jeffrey, Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design and Conduct Effective Tests, Wiley, 2008.

Transparency to the Entire Translation Process Through Translation Management Systems

By: Shannon Zimmerman
CEO, Sajan

An important but often missed component in effectively managing localization efforts is transparency into the process itself. In this issue of Forms Talk, we will take a look at what transparency means as it relates to localization and the many benefits this provides. Traditionally, when a customer requests a project, they have little information beyond a return/completion date and very little control once it is in the hands of their Language Service Provider (LSP). Technology is becoming more and more important in that it can provide a more thorough picture into the complex process of translation. Through the implementation of a technology-enabled Translation Management System (TMS), all those who touch a given project will gain a view into the process. This access and complete transparency for all parties who touch a given project (customers, project requestors, project managers, translators, reviewers etc.) provides a complete collaborative environment and one that automates many of the processes that have historically caused “bottlenecks” in the workflow process with traditional vendors. Gone are the days when a requestor has to pick up the phone just to obtain the status of their projects. Portals with configurable dashboards give users information 24/7 just by logging in.

Partnering with your LSP
As a customer, it is important to know who will touch your translation projects and the qualifications of those individuals. Ask your LSP how linguists are selected and aligned to support you long term. Ideally, they are selected based on subject matter expertise, education, experience, and any relevant certifications. This is especially critical as it will significantly impact the quality of translations. Many LSP’s select “first available”. Although this can support quick turnaround times, faster is not always better. Again, your LSP should align a primary, secondary and, depending on the volume, a tertiary linguist to ensure ongoing support and consistency. Consistency is an important factor in acquiring quality translations. A linguistic team that is selected and aligned for the long term becomes increasingly familiar with the subject matter, style and client terminology which fosters better quality outcomes. In addition, it is important to understand the qualifications of the account and project team that will manage translation projects for you. Strong communication and project management skills are required to manage your projects effectively. Having experience in working with other customers within your industry vertical is a significant advantage as they will be able to share best practices and consult with you to identify efficiencies that can be gained within your process. No client process is the same and therefore, it will be important to know and understand the team that will be working on your behalf to drive success with your translation projects.

Project Status
It is becoming increasingly important within large organizations to not only understand the complexities surrounding the process of translation, but to be involved in the decisions surrounding the workflow milestones. This collaborative effort should enable you to gain complete visibility into the status and major milestones of all projects, particularly as the volume of content and languages increase over time. Knowing the process and having complete visibility into the status helps the customer gain confidence in their LSP that the milestones are being met. Some advantages of having project status visibility are highlighted below:

• Early identification of potential risks or “bottlenecks” in the process, particularly during the customer In Country Reviewer process that is often where delays in project timelines can occur. This allows for the implementation of client/vendor procedures to mitigate such delays before they significantly impact the project timeline.
• Customers can confidently submit new, subsequent projects requests if they know that the “review” and file reconstruction milestones have been met in order to gain TM leverage on new content.

  o   Often customers “wait” to submit new requests until a project is fully delivered in order to gain reuse benefits of the translation memory from the previous project.

  o   After final review of the content is complete, the TM can be leveraged immediately while other final touches on the initial project are being made (i.e., desktop publishing and quality assurance).

  o   This level of transparency can help improve the “cycle time” by pushing more projects thru the process quicker, particularly for projects that have tighter deadlines.

• Additional project status details that may be important to you might include:

o   Pending tasks

o   Stage of the workflow the project files are in (e.g., pre-process, segmentation pre-translate, translation, approval, reconstruct, graphic design)

o   Percentage of completion (per file / per language)

o   Requested date

o   Estimated completion date

o   Completion date

o   Days open

o   Target languages

o   Leveraged words

o   Leveraged percent

o   Money saved (based on translation memory reuse)

o   History detail of the project (chronology of the project with time and date stamps)

o   Audit and version trail of each segment stored in the translation memory (TM) database

o   Digital certificates/sign offs

o   Completed files

o   Billing code (if applicable)

o   Project requestor and contact info

o   Project submission date

o   Comments

All of the above details are just some examples of information that your LSP, at a minimum, should be able to communicate on a regular basis. However, having this information at your finger tips 24x7 via a web-enabled portal environment enables you to find the right information at the right time without waiting for a report to be generated and shared by your LSP.

Business Intelligence Reporting
When managing a localization budget, it is important to understand the value you are getting from your LSP. In today’s economy, many localization departments work with a defined budget and yet they are being pushed to translate more and stretch the budget dollars further. Business Intelligence reporting can help you solidify your localization budgets year over year and gain “buy-in” from upper management, whether they view localization as a strategic component of your business or not. Some examples are provided below as to what information is important and the value that Business Intelligence Reporting can provide you:

• Monthly, quarterly and annual cost savings reports - any time you are cost-justifying your budgets with upper management, demonstrating quarter over quarter cost savings can go a long way to maintaining or gaining additional budget dollars.
• Translation Memory Reuse Statistics – how much TM leverage are you gaining quarter over quarter to impact your overall cost savings? Are there new product launches or content sources that may impact the percentages over time? Are there new languages introduced that will show an immediate TM leverage with each consecutive project? Although on a per project basis, the TM reuse percentage is disclosed, it is imperative that you view this more holistically on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis. This enables you to show some hard data to management and demonstrates your ability to monitor expenditures and stay within budget.
• In order to budget each year, understanding your overall project and word volume can be quite helpful as well. Having the ability to view this on a per language basis, by date ranges and other relevant parameters will gain you significant visibility into the volume of translations that were processed over a period of time.
• Other business intelligence reports might include average cycle time, project details and Translation Memory detail. Each of these provide even more visibility for budget planning and resource alignment for both you and your Language Service Provider.

Over the last decade, organizations have demanded more transparency into the localization process. Localization/Translation is often times an “after thought” and not looked upon by upper management as strategic. However, those who are in the trenches managing the localization process and budget experience the need to truly “partner” with their Language Service Provider versus simply processing translation projects. This is particularly true in today’s economy when budgets are being squeezed and there is a need to stretch the budget dollars further.

Philosophically, having a more holistic approach to localization and translation has many benefits. Translation begins with the authoring of source content. The Global Content Lifecycle is the premise that value can be added to content as it moves through the chain by applying people, process, and technology elements at each phase of the process. There is a growing need to integrate localization/translation and publishing with authoring, as well as implement workflow to drive the flow of information through the process. This has been a focus at Sajan for some time now and we have successfully implemented varying levels of integration to assist our customers based on their system environments. Sajan offers a complete end-to-end solution to support the localization process from authoring to translation and full integration.

Learn from the Master: A New Article by Robert Barnett

By: Margaret Tassin, CFSP, CDC
Newsletter Editor

One of the most prolific writers on forms and forms issues is Robert Barnett. Rob is a long-time member of BFMA and has generously provided us with a new article on a massive Australian project to review a large group of forms, learn what is causing so many errors and the later process to improve the forms and reduce the errors. This article has excellent illustrations of before and after forms design and notes about what worked and why.

Here is the article abstract: "From time to time organisations are faced with the need to review all their forms, often with inexperienced staff and limited resources. This article is based on the author’s recent experience in assisting with such a review for Centrelink, an agency of the Australian Department of Human Services that handles social security, veterans’ and all similar type payments. It highlights many of the typical problems that people encounter when filling out forms and shows how they were solved."

You can click here to view the article in PDF.

Robert Barnett has 40 years experience in forms analysis and information management. He has extensive experience in forms management, forms design (both paper and electronic), records management, and integration of computer systems into the practical business environment. Rob has wide ranging experience in designing electronic forms for various Australia Government Departments and businesses. He is well known internationally as a writer, lecturer and consultant and many of his books are available in BFMA's bookstore. Rob is a long-standing member of BFMA and has spoken at many Symposia. In 1998, he received BFMA's Jo Warner Award for services to the form systems profession.

Technology-Enabled Translation Services: Language Translation Storage and Retrieval

By: Shannon Zimmerman
CEO, Sajan

The storage, portability and retrieval of translation memory (TM) are key to lowering costs, increasing quality and consistency, and shortening cycle time when obtaining translations. Language Service Providers (LSP) must be able to ensure their clients that they provide the technology to store translations for future re-use, as well as provide the tools to import and cleanse existing translation memory, and providing direct access to that memory. In this issue of Forms Talk we will examine the different elements that make up advanced data management in translation memory and why these elements are important to the corporate buyer.

Translation Memory

Most LSP’s now use some form of Translation Memory (TM). A translation memory, or TM, is a type of database that is used in software programs designed to aid human translators. It houses previously translated content with the intention of reusing said content. Some software programs that use translation memories are known as translation management systems (TMS). Translation memories are also commonly used in conjunction with dedicated computer assisted translation (CAT) desktop tools.

Translation memory was first created to serve the linguist. Database files were used by the linguists performing the translation tasks in order to select previously translated segments for re-use. From there, most LSP’s want to manage translation memory on behalf of their clients and they began to store translation memory and create context based files, as well as exchanging translation memory files with their linguists - extracting the appropriate translation memory files from a file library and emailing them to the linguist on a project-by-project basis. This created version control issues, as the LSP housed multiple TM’s in addition to the linguists saving those TM’s on their personal desktops. LSP’s simply needed to better manage the TM.

Translation Memory, although it has served its purpose, has proven to be insufficient as a translation technology solution. It was created for Translators to maximize productivity and increase revenues. Translation technology now has to be used at an enterprise level to be successful in the global market; which means that enterprise solutions, not desktop tools, must be employed.

Mandy LSP’s who claim "centralized" translation memory, are simply referencing the storing in one location of many different (disparate) TM files. True centralization is the storing of all translation memory data into one file, with everyone accessing that same file. Using the traditional TM method, single source segments can still be stored in multiple translation memory files, which therefore diminish the integrity of the "context" of the segments.

Consider the probability of the same source segment residing in several of those different database files. The linguist is then burdened with determining for the client what the intent of the source segment is in any one instance. Then consider the likelihood that there will be inconsistent translations of those same source segments. This (traditional) method of TM brings with it the following risks: linguists determining context resulting in higher cost and extended turnaround times for the linguists, inconsistent translations, lengthened cycle time and higher translation costs.

When one considers the use of words with multiple meanings, context becomes very important to accurately convey your intended meaning. For example:

"Make a better impression."

The word "impression" could refer to: an emotion or feeling, an image retained as a consequence of experience, the act or process of impressing, a humorous imitation of the voice and mannerisms of another person, an initial or single coat of paint, or an imprint of the teeth and surrounding tissues for use in making dentures.

With an enterprise-class Translation Management system that uses one central repository, this phrase can exist in both contexts without the worry of one getting used inaccurately, and without the linguist taking the time to determine which translation best suits the context. Automated processes can determine that prior to the linguist receiving the project.

Advanced translation memory data management serves to optimize translation memory in terms of re-use, accuracy and compliance. This type of data management is leading edge in the industry, and offers clients greater re-use through the centralized storage, and more accurate re-use through the contextual indexing. The greater re-use dramatically decreases translation costs, reduces project cycle time and significantly improves brand consistency. Furthermore, this advanced data management allows clients the ability to conduct trend analysis, compliance analysis, and the tracking of all iterations of each segment within their central repository of language translations. Many LSP’s are challenged in the latter due to inefficient data management capabilities. It is important to discuss this in detail with your LSP as this will directly impact your costs and cycle times.

Portability

Due to the different databases residing on different servers, a variety of file formats have emerged. Proprietary formats generally emerged from LSP’s thus the exchange between formats becomes extremely important. From this, the Translation Memory Exchange (TMX) standard was established in 1998. The TMX standard allows clients flexibility and control over their TM asset, and also provides access to a broader pool of service providers; promoting competition.

Clients should be sure to confirm with their service providers that they are using the TMX standard within their TM. It is worth noting, however, that a vendor can technically comply with the TMX standard, but include proprietary tags that can degrade when passed to another vendor.

Multilingual Search

The key to maximizing the value of translation memory is aligning the data you search with the algorithms you use to search it.

Fundamentally, all algorithms in the translation space that mine translation memory for matches are trying to accomplish the same thing.

1. Find exact matches: Matches that are 100% the same as the search parameter.
2. Find approximate matches: Matches that are nearly the same and can be adapted easily by a linguist at a lower rate to say the exactly the same thing as the search parameter (typically called "fuzzy matches).

Finding exact matches is relatively simple, and most databases and search algorithms find exact matches well. The differentiation is in the algorithms ability to find linguistically useful approximate matches. Scientifically you can define approximate matching as: "The task of searching for sub-strings of text which are within a predefined edit distance threshold of a given pattern."

In the translation industry, the most common approximate matching algorithm used is the Levenshtein edit distance, usually represented not as a raw calculation but as a percentage of the overall length of the string.

The Levenshtein algorithm is calculated by counting the minimum number of insertions, deletions or substitutions required to make one string (or sentence) the same as another string.

In some cases the Levenshtein algorithm does not properly measure the value of a candidate as an approximate match. Specifically the Levenshtein algorithm (especially when used as a percentage value):

• Over-penalizes some strings based on length
• Doesn’t consider non-translatable sub strings
• Doesn’t consider word order or linguistic relevance
• Doesn’t consider context
• Scalability concerns

An advanced search and match engine optimized for the language translation industry designed to out-perform traditional translation memory technologies such as Sajan’s TMate™ Search Technology can increase accuracy, consistency and compliance as well as decreasing cost and increasing capacity for high volume.

• Mate™ Search Technology has a learning agent which improves traditional search methods, making them relevant to the translation industry.
• The learning agent in TMate™ increases fuzzy match rates by 10-60% over traditional translation search and match methods.
• It is a more advanced algorithm designed specifically for the reuse of multilingual content.
• TMate™’s high performance multilingual index was built to support the enterprise.

Translation Memory is a necessity in going global. But the old adage "garbage in, garbage out" is still applicable. There are better methods out there for storing and retrieving translation memory, it is up to the client to make sure their preferred LSP is using the most innovative technology to provide best of breed storage (centralized) and open access to their TM.

Coming up in the next issue of Forms Talk, Sajan will examine transparency to the entire translation process through Business Intelligence (BI) tools.

Technology-Enabled Translation Services: Language Translation Quality

By: Shannon Zimmerman,
CEO, Sajan

Translation quality is vital to all global businesses. Language Service Providers (LSP) must be able to ensure their clients that their messages are accurate and that their brand remains intact. Since translation quality is so subjective, it can be difficult to guarantee high quality. Groundwork must first be laid so that the client and the LSP agree on the criteria that deem a translation "good" as opposed to the criteria that deem a translation "poor". There are manual (human) steps, process components as well as automated measures that can be taken to ensure quality. In this issue of Forms Talk we will examine these different pieces that make up the whole for Total Quality Management (TQM).

ISO 9001:2000 Certification
ISO 9001:2000 Certification offers standards for both global communication services and technology solutions and can be an important factor when considering Language Service providers. ISO 9001:2000 is a set of quality management requirements that demonstrates an organization's ability to consistently provide product that meets customer expectations and any applicable regulatory requirements while aiming to enhance customer satisfaction. There are other certifications such as EN 15038 focused on "Translation services". For example, although Sajan is not EN15038 certified, we do believe we conform to this standard. Our processes were built upon ISO 9001:2000 and Six Sigma methodologies with digital signature enablers built into the system. This certification and solution meets, and in some cases exceeds the requirements for EN15038 certification. It is wise to inquire about such certifications with your LSP to ensure they are adhering to standards that meet your requirements.

Digital Signatures/Auditing
Many companies are regulated and require their Language Service provider to deliver "digital signature" sign off from the translators to support compliance efforts. The overall services and technology offered should enable certificates of authenticity for each language and each file of every project. This capability should also be customizable to the client’s needs and verbiage for accountability and tracking purposes.

Translation is however, one part of a larger process and compliance results from an audit of the entire process. Helping a company achieve compliance is more than providing electronic digital signature; an audit trail of each segment within the translation memory database helps to support this further. Few Language Service Providers offer or manage a complete version/audit trail of the translation memory at the segment level. This includes time and date stamped change management, security and redundancy of data storage and overall data Integrity/security. Client records should be locked ("closed") to avoid manipulation. Auditing and versioning the data allows clients the ability to conduct compliance analysis as well as the tracking of all iterations of each segment within their central repository of language translations.

Linguist Selection/Management
When working with or evaluating your LSP, it is important to understand how they select and qualify their translators. Many LSP’s simply select "first available" without considering criteria such as subject matter expertise, education, accreditation and experience. This is likely going to result in both short and long term quality issues. It is imperative that the linguistic team be aligned based on such criteria and, as much as possible, the team should be aligned permanently to ensure long term consistency and accuracy of your translated content. Although the linguist may have subject matter expertise within an industry, they still require time to adapt to your specific "style" and cultural requirements surrounding branding and messaging as well as specific product information. A good analogy would be the difference between what you know on your first day of work in a new job vs. what you know 90 days into the job. It takes time for a linguist to "learn" the specific subject matter and product offerings of a specific company.

Additional considerations surrounding your LSP should entail discussions around how they manage linguist relationships ongoing to ensure ongoing accountability as it relates to quality. Your LSP should be able to measure and track quality in a way that enables them to identify whether a linguist is delivering high quality and on a consistent basis. The standards on which they are measured are as important. If quality is measured "in-process" for example, the information/data can be used to adjust and adapt more rapidly to such standards. Standards can be categorized by percentage of errors based on industry averages. Corrective action and preventative actions must be put into place to mitigate repeat quality issues. The ability to investigate the root cause of the error, where and at what point it was introduced, allows the LSP to implement the corrective and preventive action. Many LSP’s do not measure quality in process and therefore are not able to adapt and rectify issues quickly.

Once translations are completed by the selected linguistic team, they go through a translation review process. This review process is much like approving and editing your English content before publishing. It is an important and highly recommended step towards driving better quality. During this translation review process, the reviewers are reviewing the translations from the translators at the segment level. As they identify edits or changes that need to be made, per the categories mentioned earlier, the reviewer can do the following:

Edit and override the translated segment

Provide a "reason for the change" – categories listed below:

• Accuracy - The quality of the translated (target) text being near, or true, to the original source text
• Spelling/Grammar - The quality of adherence to standard grammatical rules of the target text for a particular language
• Language - The quality of the culturally accepted, and utilized, meaning of words within the target text
• Style - The way in which source text is translated as it relates to subjective qualities such as, but not limited to, expression and arrangement
• Terminology (Client approved) - The vocabulary of technical terms used within an organization
• Terminology (industry) - The vocabulary of technical terms used, or widely recognized, within a particular industry

Add additional comments, "reason detail", to the system to elaborate on changes made to the segments

There are significant advantages to capturing quality information "in-process". First, it allows the LSP to evaluate instances when abnormal amount of edits or changes to the translators work by the reviewer is occurring. In these instances, the quality department can investigate the root cause and implement a process to eliminate and minimize this. The reason a reviewer edits a translators’ work, can vary widely and requires some investigation. When measured in process, your LSP can react and address such instances more quickly.

Second, an auto-generated and detailed report can be sent, on a per project basis to each linguist, indicating, not only the edits or changes made by the reviewer, but the "reason" for the changes. This enables the linguists to more rapidly "adapt" to the style and language requirements necessary for delivering quality translations. Quality is a process, not an event.

Consistency/Terminology Management
Overall management of industry and client glossaries/terminology is a major factor in managing quality and client expectations. Most LSP’s prefer to receive glossary terms that are frequently used throughout the client content (i.e., product names, phrases, industry-specific terms). This can then be translated and approved so that it can become a standard for all future translations and puts some rules around the content for the linguistic teams to adhere to. This takes the quality of translations to another level. Many customers struggle with managing terminology and maintaining glossaries and strict adherence to these is difficult. Many LSP support the clients by helping to create and maintain such glossaries for a cost. It will serve you well to implement this prior to kicking off your first project. However, it is never too late to begin the process of building a glossary. This enhanced usage of terms will ensure clear, consistent messaging and help reduce release date slips and the need to reprint collateral. There may also be specific style and formatting guidelines (bold, italics, all caps for product names or titles, fonts etc…) which your company may be required to adhere to for all of your English source content. This often spills over into your localized content. It is important to document such guidelines with your LSP in order to ensure they are also adhered to where possible.

Quality Assurance Measures Should Include:

Audit:
Your Language Service Provider is likely willing to participate in an audit, ranging from internal and external ISO 9001:2000 audits, to client initiated regulatory audits, to audits of the LSP’s third party suppliers. Your LSP should be committed to supporting the audit plans of our ISO certification body as well as any audit inquiries from our current or perspective clients.

Change Control:
Effectively manage every step of the change control process related to translation project processing, from submission through actual implementation, verification, and close of project.

Compliance Support:
Digital signature sign off and audit/versioning of the data.

Corrective and Preventive Action (CAPA):
CAPA processes which focuses on the systematic investigation of discrepancies (failures and/or deviations) in order to prevent their recurrence. This investigation of failure incidence is pivotal in identifying the corrective and preventative actions undertaken. The CAPA process should be integrated with other processes critical to regulatory compliance, such as change control, audit, and customer complaints.

Customer Complaints:
Customer complaint handling must be an essential part of the quality process and an important factor in ensuring accurate document translations. This is especially true in regulated environments such as the Life Sciences industry where complaints may indicate serious safety issues. CAPA processes should be used to determine root causes of issues and to drive to resolution of those issues at their base level. If issues are found with linguist performance, your LSP must work with the client to profile new linguists as replacements to ensure that translation quality is not compromised.

Documents:
Internal document control systems for complete document control and document life cycle management around all of our controlled documents supports the quality chain. This includes routing, approval, and version control to comply with FDA GxP regulations and ISO document control quality standards.

Measurement & Sampling:
Linguist sampling to allow for the measurement of accuracy of our linguist partners. Sampling categories might include Accuracy, Grammar, Language, Spelling, Style, and Terminology. Linguists may be sampled at the project, client, or individual levels.

Training:
Quality regulations and standards require companies to execute and document employee training to ensure that their personnel know how to perform their duties within company and industry guidelines.

Validation:
It is not enough to provide linguists directly to translation projects. An LSP must screen all linguists to ensure that their skill sets and experience match customer requirements to provide the most accurate and effective translations of client documents.

Transparency:
Providing and enabling full visibility into the workflow, project status, and translation memory is rare in the localization industry.  Very few LSP’s provide this level of detail and information to their customers. Ask your LSP if they can document a consistent and repeatable workflow and enable access to your translation memory data and project status information.

Coming up in the next issue of Forms Talk, Sajan will explain the Data Management component of language translation. This issue will examine Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tools, evolving algorithms for searching, direct access to Translation Memory (TM) and transparency to the entire process through Business Intelligence (BI) tools.

Lastly, Sajan will discuss tying together all source content through the integration of Content Management Systems (CMS) and other business applications, as well as transitioning to XML authoring environments and integrating those with your translation processes through a robust management system.

Personal Development Series: Keynote Speaker for Symposium

The keynote speaker at Symposium 2009 in San Antonio will be Robert Pennington, Ph.D. Dr. Pennington is an expert in leadership and cooperation in organizations. The following is the final article in a series prior to the Symposium. Some of the techniques that are mentioned below will be directly addressed during his presentation in San Antonio.

Getting the Cooperation You Need to Succeed
By Robert Pennington & Stephen Haslam
Resource International

This is the fourth in a series of articles by Robert Pennington and Stephen Haslam that explore the challenges of understanding and accepting differences between individuals and gaining cooperation from other divisions in their own organizations. The first three sections explored why we take other people’s behaviors personally, why they act differently than we would like, and what can be done to make organizational training effective in addressing the inevitable misunderstandings and conflicts that result from these differences. This article goes beyond individual training to address how to build organizational culture that supports collaboration.

Individual Training Is Not Enough
Sometimes, even if you train individuals, there are norms, procedures or unwritten rules in an organization’s culture that inhibit change.

For example, we taught teambuilding, collaboration and conflict resolution to a major corporation. But the corporation uses a “forced ranking” system of performance evaluation. Supervisors are forced by the ranking system to mark a specific percentage of employees down each year. Employees know this. They know their supervisors are actually looking for reasons to mark people down.

If you worked in a company with a similar performance ranking policy, and a team member of yours saw you about to make a mistake, he might not lend a helping hand, but instead might let you fail in order to increase his own ranking. As a consequence, the organization’s culture actually facilitated greater conflict between team members by pitting them against one another! Employees didn’t see the success of others as contributing to their own success. This type of culture made it difficult for people to set aside their individual career goals and work toward the benefit of the team, even if they were told teamwork was valued. The same problem can exist between departments as well.

Address Organizational Dysfunction
At the same time you need to train people how to not take individual differences personally, you also need to address the organizational dysfunctions that promote misunderstandings, conflicts and differences in priorities.

For example, there might be a lack of cooperation on proposals or tenders. We have worked with companies to form teams that support sales departments in developing proposals for each product offered to a client. These teams may include members of the sales, operations, engineering, and finance departments. What we learn is that many competing priorities make success difficult. Often the sales team would promise more than the operations team can deliver within a certain time period, or with specifications that the engineering team believes could not be done safely with existing technology. Meanwhile, the finance team wants the signed agreement on the books to reflect positively on this quarter's financial report.

The result is that the operations team will look bad when it cannot deliver and projects cannot stay within budget. Engineering may later say, “We would have told you that wouldn’t work if you had ever asked us.” Yet the sales team still gets its commission on time. This all leads to a culture of resentment, suspicion, and distrust.

Perhaps past training and team building approaches have been ineffective in making any real impact to change the company culture, work habits, and work relationships. Following is a “two-pronged” approach that we have used to integrate training with facilitated work sessions to improve the ways team interact, which often is so crucial to an organization’s success.

Combine Training and Team Work Sessions
Here is a two-pronged approach to address both the individual and organizational dysfunctions. First, train all team members in the MBTI, change management and conflict resolution tools.

Second, facilitate collaborative work-sessions to process real-time issues using the models presented in the trainings. Do all this within the framework of Patrick Lencioni’s four-step model to overcome the effect of silos and turf wars (“Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars,” 2006 Jossey-Bass).

The four steps are:

1. Create commitment with a rallying cry (project),
2. Create clarity by ”defining objectives” (project),
3. Define accountability by connecting the project’s defining, objectives to standard operating departmental objectives, and,
4. Focus on results with metrics to get everyone clear on how progress will be measured.

By going through these steps together (all in the same room and using a shared set of communication tools), focusing their discussion on how they would work differently on an upcoming proposal, project teams can establish new agreements and ground rules that can help to ensure project success and will help them check one another when they fall back into old habits. More information on RI’s approach to working with teams is available online.

Easier Said Than Done
You can’t just give a model or technique to a group and expect everything to change. It’s like saying; “Since this model is great, let’s now all act like one happy family and just get along!” It won’t happen. Change requires more than pointing a direction.

People need to be trained how to stimulate productive ideological conflict (as opposed to personal conflict) so that disagreements and different viewpoints can be aired openly and respectfully. If this is not done, information will be withheld and overall success will suffer.

To accomplish this, because of the history of taking things personally, an objective, trained facilitator may be required to guide team members through their old habits into new sustainable agreements.

It’s easier said than done. But it is also easier done - than not done!

If all this sounds familiar and these approaches make sense, then consider contacting Rob and Stephen to discuss how they could help your organization. Contact them at 713-305-5117 or get more information on their web site at: www.resource-i.com

Technology-Enabled Translation Services: Driving Cost Out of Going Global

By: Shannon Zimmerman,
CEO Sajan

Language has long been a barrier when any company enters a foreign market. If potential buyers cannot read about your product, they are not likely to buy it. If customers cannot read the product instructions, their experience with your product may be compromised. So companies rely on Language Service Providers (LSP), often referred to as Translation Agencies, to translate this vital content.

In the up-coming issues of Forms Talk Sajan will examine different components of the Global Content Lifecycle. This series will focus on what the different components are, why they are necessary for international business, and what the benefits will be to your global initiatives.

Historically speaking, traditional LSPs have a good understanding of language translation. The challenge for these LSPs is to understand that a blended solution approach of language translation service and innovative technology can generate far greater value for the customer. The translation and localization industry witnessed great change in 2008. Acquisitions, consolidation and the continued merging with the content management industry have made it clear that technology will be the force driving this industry into 2009.

Language translation services, though often treated like a commodity service, have traditionally been expensive and relatively slow in delivery. Human translators can typically translate 2,500 words per day on average. This fact alone creates constraints on the available supply of translation services and, when positioned against the growing demand, will provide technology innovators with an advantage.

The shortage in human translators will result in increased need for translation solution providers who can offer technology-based solutions to improve the efficiency in language translation services. Companies need to obtain translation in an accurate, timely, and cost effective manner. Most will also need to integrate their multilingual content with other enterprise systems to establish a cohesive single repository of all global content. Industry participants agree that technology is an absolute necessity to the long term success of enterprise-class globalization strategy. Both direct industry analysts and general business analysts seem to agree that a more integrated solution, often referred to as the Global Content Lifecycle, will be required to be successful in the future. As a result, language translation is no longer likely to be treated as an afterthought in the globalization process, but rather, as an integral part of an enterprise system.

Sajan views the globalization industry more holistically as it relates to an enterprise approach which encompasses an end-to-end solution:

• Authoring of source content
• Storage of source content within a content or enterprise management system for easy access
• Content Management System (CMS) integrations with other system environments (i.e., translation management systems)
• Translation Management Systems (TMS) for managing translation workflow and processes
• Publishing of content in both monolingual and multilingual formats in a multitude of media formats (i.e., web, print, software etc…)

This end-to-end solution is a necessity for large global businesses. Sajan’s belief is that global corporations are realizing how important local communication is to these markets and are starting to understand the need for a strategy that is holistic to the enterprise. We see that the market will continue to consolidate and that technology will lead the pack in how corporations provide global communication, cost savings and quality translations. A ‘service-centric" only model can no longer keep pace with the increasing demand for "globalized" content from large enterprise customers.

Some key points for companies to consider when looking for a holistic approach in a Translation Service Provider might include:

• Innovative technology to streamline the translation process
• Talented professionals with the appropriate processes in place to enable them to more efficiently process translation projects while still adhering to quality standards
• Quality controls through technology (in-process/automated), people and process components to ensure quality on every level and at each step in the process of every translation project (not post-process)
• Ability to scale to meet growing translation needs within your organization
• Advanced data management for translation storage and reuse, allowing transparency to that data, version control and audit trails at the segment level
• Advanced analytics to report on the efficiencies of your translation partner – cost savings, translation memory utilization, timelines, segment history, etc. all accessible directly to you, the end user
• Integration capabilities to further streamline your translation process
• Other value-add components

In the next issue of Forms Talk, Sajan will examine translation quality which will include a holistic view on Total Quality Management (TQM) encompassing version controls, consistency checks and ISO certifications and Six Sigma methodologies.

Next, Sajan will explain the Data Management component of language translation. This issue will examine Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tools, evolving algorithms like Sajan’s TMate™ Search Technology, direct access to Translation Memory (TM) and transparency to the entire process through Business Intelligence (BI) tools.

Lastly, Sajan will discuss tying together all source content through the integration of Content Management Systems (CMS) and other business applications, as well as transitioning to XML authoring environments and integrating those with your translation processes through a robust Translation Management System like Sajan’s GCMS.

We hope to shed some light on how the right translation solutions can help drive cost out of your international business budget.

Personal Development Series: Keynote Speaker for Symposium

The keynote speaker at Symposium 2009 in San Antonio will be Robert Pennington, Ph.D. Dr. Pennington is an expert in leadership and cooperation in organizations. The following is the third in a series of articles prior to the Symposium.  Some of the techniques that are mentioned below will be directly addressed during his presentation in San Antonio.

Getting the Cooperation You Need to Succeed
By Robert Pennington & Stephen Haslam
Resource International

This article series addresses the challenges of understanding and accepting differences between individuals and gaining cooperation from other divisions in their own organizations. It was written by Robert Pennington and Stephen Haslam partners with Resource International, and includes links to additional materials that can be useful to anyone who must depend on cooperation from others to succeed at their job.

Certainly awareness is one. There are many ways awareness can be increased, e.g., through short “brown bag” presentations, web based trainings, audio and video recordings and through reading books and/or articles such as this. It is a basic truth that:

What we are unaware of controls us. What we become aware of we can change.

Training is another step that can help in this transition, especially if those who work together are trained together. Through a series of structured experiences designed not just to increase awareness, but to also provide practice in the application of that awareness, real insight and the ability to practically apply that insight can be developed. When training is given to those who work together, their own history of perceptions about each other validate the insights that most differences are not personal, as happens whenever we introduce co-workers to the insights inherent in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

But beyond awareness and training is the ability to successfully address organizational dysfunctions that can sabotage even a great training program. Dealing with a team, department or organization may require more time and cost, but the potential for real and lasting improvement in functioning is actually achievable.

Team Development Program: Biggest Bang for Buck
The greatest potential solution involves a combination of awareness and training with people who work together. This is riskier because of the history such people have with each other. But when that history can be successfully addressed the benefits are exponentially more powerful and relevant.

Participants in any program tend to have difficulties translating insight into behavior. A team development approach can provide the additional support and coaching usually required for significant change to occur. Below are a few components of a successful process we have used to help organizations overcome historical dysfunctions that impede cooperation between co-workers and between teams and/or departments. More information about this multiphase process can be downloaded online at: http://www.resource-i.com/intactteam.html.

 

• Begin with confidential interviews and anonymous Internet-accessed surveys. We have found this can reduce resistance and increase motivation to participate in “yet another training.” Valuable knowledge is gained prior to training so that employees can be guided to apply skills learned to real-work situations. This is much more powerful than the theoretical “simulation” examples more traditional trainings use that do not apply to participants real challenges. People are motivated to deal with the real stuff. Training should help them do it.

• Conduct a series of 2-3 hour highly interactive programs. Teach supervisors and employees how to recognize and appreciate the value in the inevitable differences in people so that they don’t take another person’s different behavior so personally. Teach everyone how to better manage the stress of change. Teach a few practical interpersonal skills to everyone, such as Resource International’s communication techniques: Three Questions that Reduce Misunderstanding^©, The Five Levels of Communication^©, Three Steps in Giving Constructive Feedback^© and The Six Stages of Building Supportive Agreements^©.

• Facilitate team meetings to coach leaders to be good models in each of these three areas, and also to support employees in implementing skills learned with the leader and with each other.

• Facilitate conflict resolution to lay a practical (and believable!) foundation for improvements in specific relationships. In any team there are usually one or two relationships between specific people that need the most attention. Sometimes it is an individual who needs the attention. Sometimes an experienced facilitator is needed to guide such individuals through historical conflicts to make new agreements about how to cooperate or, in the extreme, to realize that they need to move on to another job.

• Conduct a multi-day “work oriented” retreat where the real work of the team is conducted. Use facilitation to practice what was learned during the short 2-3 hour programs. People will find more value in a “retreat” that deals with the real stuff than one that simply takes them through games and simulations. During such a team development retreat employees use communication tools and techniques to make agreements with one another about how to adjust to each other’s differences and expectations, and how to best handle it when they disagree – which they will!
  
  You can’t get any better than having agreements about how you will respectfully handle disagreements.

• Incorporate into the performance evaluation expectations for behavioral and interpersonal skills, in addition to their regular job description tasks. When employees realize their review will be based in part on how well they handle their relationships with others and their abilities to utilize specific communication models, i.e., Five Levels of Communication, they are more motivated to address issues constructively, especially since they now know how.

• And maybe most importantly, provide ongoing coaching to leaders so that they become the best models of how they want their employees to behave. Leaders set the tone that becomes the organizational culture. To build a culture that promotes constructive ideological conflict that leads to collaboration, commitment, and effective results this change needs to start at the top. A good resource is Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

Once a team has become functional then it can be a positive change agent for improving functioning with other teams. Read next month’s article!

If all this sounds familiar and these approaches make sense, then consider contacting Rob and Stephen to discuss how they could help your organization. Contact them at 713-305-5117 or get more information on their web site at: www.resource-i.com

Personal Development Series: Keynote Speaker for Symposium

The keynote speaker at Symposium 2009 in San Antonio will be Robert Pennington, Ph.D. Dr. Pennington is an expert in leadership and cooperation in organizations. The following is the second in a series of articles prior to the Symposium.

Getting the Cooperation You Need to Succeed
By Robert Pennington & Stephen Haslam
Resource International

This article series addresses the challenges of understanding and accepting differences between individuals and gaining cooperation from other divisions in their own organizations. It was written by Robert Pennington and Stephen Haslam partners with Resource International, and includes links to additional materials that can be useful to anyone who must depend on cooperation from others to succeed at their job.

The second segment explores why people are different from you and gives you different ways to frame and identify that difference.  By knowing the differences, you can understand them better and gain the cooperation you need to succeed.

Why People Are Different From You
We often misunderstand other people’s motives for why they do what they do. We interpret their behavior in light of what it would mean if we behaved that way. Often we aren’t even aware of it because most of our reactions are automatic and unconscious.

There are a number of important conceptual models to know in order to handle our reactions in a more conscious, respectful, productive manner when dealing with people who behave differently than we think is best. These include: The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, The Waterfall of Cause and Effect, and The Emotional Computer, to name a few.

Myer-Briggs Type Indicator
Carl Jung developed theories about the potentials within us that make us whole human beings. Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers developed a model based on Jung’s theories to help people recognize our own preferences and understand one another and ourselves better. Their research eventually developed into the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® (MBTI), the most widely used person styles inventory in the world based on more than 80 years of research.

The insight is that behaviors that are comfortable for one person are the very things that are uncomfortable for someone else.

Some of the examples that are the most obvious between people are the differences between what Jung defined as Introverts and Extroverts. The common misunderstanding is that all Introverts are shy and lacking in confidence while all Extroverts are confident and friendly. But the difference between the two has nothing to do with confidence or sociability. The difference is where we focus our attention to generate energy.

Extraversion (E)	Introversion (I)
Focus on the Outer world of people and things	Focus on the inner world of ideas and impressions
Think “out loud”	Think things through first
Get actively involved with and energized by the outer world	Have a very active inner life which energizes you.

Extroverts energize themselves by interacting with others and with the world around them. They are drawn to talking to people in order to work things out in their own minds. An Extrovert’s thinking is often a public experience. When an Extrovert has a thought about something, he may start “thinking out loud” immediately, possibly interrupting others around him. Extrovert’s thoughts are louder than other people’s words! An Extrovert may actually be energized by others interrupting him. Such back and forth interaction stimulates his thinking process. Extroverts gain energy by interacting.

And that kind of interaction is exactly what stops the flow for an Introvert because Introverts energize themselves by reflecting inwardly. They are more likely to gather their thoughts internally, in their own minds, and then share with others what they have already worked out. As a result, an Introvert is likely to believe it is only polite to let people finish expressing a thought, then pause to reflect on what the person said before responding. Other people’s words are louder than an Introvert’s thoughts. An Introvert gains energy by reflecting, and may even prefer to do so alone.

Put the two of them together and you are bound to get misunderstandings. The Extrovert “thinks out loud” before he is working something through in his own mind, trying to get a spontaneous and immediate response. But the Introvert tries to reflect silently on the topic in order to get clear, while the Extrovert keeps interrupting, repeatedly. It seems to the Extrovert that the Introvert is not interested because the Introvert is not interacting. By contrast, it seems to the Introvert that the Extrovert is not interested in the Introvert’s viewpoint because the Extrovert keeps interrupting with his own thoughts.

To avoid lots of hurt and anger, an Extrovert and an Introvert have to learn to not take these differences personally, but rather to see the strength in each approach and change some habits in order to pull the best out of each other. For example, an Extrovert may learn to e-mail the Introvert a brief note to give the Introvert time to prepare his thoughts. Similarly, an Introvert may learn to qualify his thoughts by saying, “This is just off the top of my head,” or “Don’t hold me to this.” Each example is a small change that can produce huge benefits for an Extrovert and Introvert working together, even though they have profoundly different personal preferences for how to work.  These are not just good ideas. They are what have helped us; an extreme extra Extrovert (Rob) and an extreme Introvert (Stephen) successfully work as business partners for twenty-five years!

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the many ways in which we are different from one another! For instance, the MBTI addresses innate differences in how everyone generates energy, but also how we gather information, make decisions and take actions. Misunderstandings and conflicts can occur with any of these differences if you are not aware of the value of each approach.

The Waterfall of Cause and Effect^©
The Waterfall of Cause and Effect outlines how these differences express through our behaviors. It is a basic model that we developed based on cognitive psychology. Simply, our beliefs determine our emotions, which in turn affect our behaviors, producing results in the world around us. Notice the little graphic to the right that shows how it’s like a waterfall with positive thoughts producing positive emotions down to effective results, while negative thoughts flowing down to producing ineffective results.

The Emotional Computer^©
The Emotional Computer is another model that visually represents in a flowchart form how emotions result from beliefs that are either conscious or unconscious. Notice that more unconscious beliefs are noted in the model than conscious beliefs. When you express an emotion through your behavior, that behavior becomes information (data) input into the other person’s “emotional computer.” But that person has different beliefs based on different experiences. Your behavior (volume and tone of voice, facial expressions) may mean something different to that person than it means to you. So he/she makes a negative judgment and takes it personally, and both of you are right back in the cycle of conflict again.

The more you understand how these things are true about yourself, the more you will understand others. And the more you will not be taking their behavior personally!

If all this sounds familiar and these approaches make sense, then consider contacting Rob and Stephen to discuss how they could help your organization. Contact them at 713-305-5117 or get more information on their web site at: www.resource-i.com

New Edition of Managing Business Forms Released

By: Margaret Tassin, CFSP, CDC
VP, Programs

Robert Barnett has recently revised and published the fifth edition of Managing Business Forms. The latest edition is expanded with more material and updated research. Barnett includes samples of forms department forms that cover most aspects of the forms management processes In addition, there are a sample policy statement and sample procedures that you can use as guidelines to develop your own procedures.

Like all books written by Rob Barnett, this one is full of practical guidance. It details how to handle day-to-day work in a forms management department from a best practices point of view. This book should be the most referenced book in any forms professional's library.

Robert Barnett is a long-time member of BFMA and a winner of the prestigious Jo Warner Award. He has more than forty years experience in forms, systems, procedures writing and records management. His other books include Forms for People: designing forms that people can use, Micrographics and Office Efficiency, The Forms Designer's Quick Reference Guide and Practical Playscript: writing procedure manuals that people can use. You can order his books from the BFMA bookstore, where you can also view the table of contents.

Rob has been an inspiration and sage for many BFMA members. Although Rob continues to work, he is seriously ill. For an open letter regarding his condition and a recent update, click here. Rob's e-mail address is rob@rbainformationdesign.com.au. We at BFMA wish him all the best and thank him for enriching our personal and professional lives.

Ask Ms. GeekSpeak

By: Laurie Weaver
Member Columnist

Have you been trying to work with Information Technology, but your initiatives and patience grind to a screeching halt? Do the terms they use sound like so much gobbledygook? Do you ever get the sneaking feeling that IT professionals just may, in fact, have come from Mars? If so, you've probably run headlong into some common "GeekSpeak" roadblocks. The aim of this ongoing column is to help forms professionals and technology professionals overcome roadblocks by gaining mutual understanding, vocabulary, and context. So if you need help with specifics, or if you'd just like to know more about a techie topic, email or post any and all questions to Ask Ms. GeekSpeak. This month's topic: "Database 101."

Dear Ms. GeekSpeak, I’d like to know more about databases. What can you share?

I’m delighted to speak about one of our Forms Team’s best tools, the database. In the forms industry, many of us talk about and/or use databases. But what is under the hood of a database?

Most of the time, we think of databases as being computer based, but in the simplest terms, a database is any method by which we store and retrieve data. Surprisingly, even my grandma’s old method of storing her recipes on 3x5 index cards in a recipe box can be considered a database. In that case, just what are the attributes that make up a database?

Let’s start off with Grandma’s recipes. What could she do with those?

Databases store data. If Grandma wanted to remember a great recipe, she’d write it down on a 3x5 card and add it to her recipe box. The card is the recipe record. The box is the recipe table (the main category of the data).

Databases allow retrieval of data. If Grandma wanted to make a recipe again, she could pull the record out of her recipe box, assemble the ingredients from the stored information on that record and make it.

Databases usually have a method to sort data. Now, if Grandma was a disorganized cook, she might have just put her recipes in the box willy-nilly. But then her recipe retrieval would be a matter of looking, one by one, through all of her recipe records. Not very time efficient for a busy lady like my grandma. Her sort method is to have tabs that separate the type of recipe card by main category: cookies, main dish, salads, etc. Then, within the tabs, she would sort alphabetically. This did lead to some interesting confusion when filing “Cousin Betty’s Famous Apple Crumble” — did this go under A, B, C or F?

Databases usually have a method for searching data. Going back to the Apple Crumble recipe — searching the recipe box means going to the correct tab and looking alphabetically by the main ingredient — in this case, “a” for apple. This is my grandma’s logical design for recipes. More on that term later.

Databases usually allow the tracking of historical records and trends. To track her favorite recipes, Grandma draws stars in the upper right-hand corner to indicate a good recipe. Three stars is the ultimate recipe – good, fast and cheap! She also makes notes like “Use a little less lemon zest next time.”

Databases have records that can be created or deleted. Grandma might add an entry card from her friends or relatives if she liked their recipe. However, if a recipe bombed with her family, or turned out to be too time-consuming for the results, Grandma would toss the card, thereby optimizing the speed of future database searches.

Now let’s compare and contrast how Grandma’s recipe box is similar to tracking forms in a database:

Grandma’s Recipes	Forms Team Database
Recipe box on the kitchen table	Forms table within a FileMaker Pro application on a server
Recipe card for each recipe	Form record for each form
Ingredients, notes, instructions about each recipe are the data	Attributes about each form are the data
Entered by writing	Entered via fields
Grandma had pretty much one method of searching the recipe box	The Forms Team can electronically search the Forms Database by job number, due date, location of the production folder, or any other attribute or combination of attributes
Add and remove cards	Add and remove records

OK, now that we have the basics down, let’s take a closer look at our main GeekSpeak database phrase for the day, logical design. Database logical design is how the database designer defines the required tables, fields, and sort criteria. This also includes defining table relationships. Tables are the main categories of data, like forms or recipes. Fields are for the data we wish to track, like job numbers or ingredients. Relationships are how the records and tables relate to other records and tables.

Let’s say Grandma also has an address book of friends and relatives. Within this book, she notes the favorite recipe of each person in case he or she might come for Sunday dinner. What information would she write down that would let her most easily find the correct recipe? In this scenario, she might choose the recipe name. Since recipe name is the same in the address book as in the recipe card box, it would be considered the key between them. This would be similar in concept to creating a separate business contacts table in the Forms Database with one business contacts record for each form sponsor. One method to “hook” these two together would be adding the appropriate contact name to each form record to represent the form’s sponsor.

In order for the database designer to create a good logical design, he or she needs a good understanding about the purpose of the database. What will it be used for? What attributes do you wish to track? What kind of reports might be needed? Who will enter the data? Who will keep up the data? Are there any character limitations?

For more on that thought, see my previous column about crafting better business requirements. Like any other technology, a forms database is only as good as the planning behind it! As always, if you’d like to know more about databases, requirements, Cousin Betty’s Famous Apple Crumble, or any other “geeky” word or topic, post here, or email Ask Ms. GeekSpeak.

Personal Development Series: Keynote Speaker for Symposium

The keynote speaker at Symposium 2009 in San Antonio will be Robert Pennington, Ph.D. Dr. Pennington is an expert in leadership and cooperation in organizations. The following is the first in a series of articles prior to the Symposium.

Getting the Cooperation You Need to Succeed
By Robert Pennington & Stephen Haslam
Resource International

This article series addresses the challenges of understanding and accepting differences between individuals and gaining cooperation from other divisions in their own organizations. It was written by Robert Pennington and Stephen Haslam partners with Resource International, and includes links to additional materials that can be useful to anyone who must depend on cooperation from others to succeed at their job.

The first segment explores why we take things personally when other people do things that get on our nerves, and why this habitual reaction can actually make getting the cooperation of others more difficult.

Why We Take Things Personally
Most people were raised in families in which, whenever there was disagreement, they did not end up closer; instead, they ended up further apart. So most people had to develop unconscious, automatic defense mechanisms to avoid potentially painful disagreements and conflicts. As we all know, for some people the best defense is a good offense.

We learned to react to most differences or conflicts with discomfort and judgment:

    1. We feel uncomfortable when people don’t do what we want.

    2. We make an instant negative judgment about their behavior, and also about their motives.

    3. We take it personally!

    4. We react unconsciously and automatically in ways that usually make them uncomfortable.

Whenever you ask people to do things that are outside of their normal way of doing things or go against what’s familiar to them, you are asking them to make a change. Unfortunately, most people resist change. So it is likely they will feel some level of discomfort with what you want them to do, even if it would be helpful to you and in their own best interest. They will tend to make a negative judgment about you and about your motives. As described previously, they will take your request personally and think, "You don’t understand how difficult/challenging/wrong the change you are asking is." They will react unconsciously in ways that will make you even more uncomfortable.

Cycle of Conflicts

As a result, both of you can become stuck in a Cycle of Conflict. Their negative judgments about you and your request (Thoughts) influence how uncomfortable they feel (Emotions) which affects how they communicate (Behavior) back to you. This in turn sends a corresponding wave through you causing you to behave in ways that can actually reinforce their defensiveness. But there is another way for you to respond. You could learn to recognize that their response is not personal - it’s just difficult.

Take time right now to listen online to a 10-minute video of a ‘real life’ example described by Rob Pennington that follows this cycle of conflict and provides additional insights into habits that sabotage success.

Think about one of these people who gets on your nerves or doesn’t do what you want. Think about some of the habits they have. Isn’t it true that they would be the way they are, whether you were there or not? So, it’s not personal. They are not "doing this to you," they are just being themselves.

But even though it isn’t personal, it can still be difficult. We all have to learn how to handle differences better. One way is to realize that other people’s behavior always tells you more about them than it does about you. It’s not personal even when they mean it to be.

Could It All Just Be A Misunderstanding?

When we take another person’s behavior personally we are misunderstanding what is really happening. We believe the other person is being this way just to make our job difficult, or to get on our nerves. But upon reflection it becomes obvious that the other person will be the way they are whether we are there or not. It was a misunderstanding on our part to take it personally. Given that, what other misunderstandings might be happening?

Consider this question: What percentage of all the disagreements and conflicts that we experience do you think might be caused by misunderstandings? There is no statistically correct answer. Just get a number in mind for what you believe is true.

Now, focus only on that group of disagreements that are actually caused by misunderstandings, whatever percentage you have decided that it is. Ask yourself, "What percentage of those are caused because I misunderstand?" What number comes to mind this time? For most people it’s a much lower number!

In your better moments you may think you have some responsibility for the misunderstanding. But in the moment of the disagreement or argument, what do you believe about your position? What do you always believe about your point of view in every argument? That it’s right, right?

And when you know you’re right, if they disagree with you what do you know about their point of view? They’re wrong, of course!

When you know you are right, and you know they are wrong, what is your job? Isn’t it to point out just how wrong they are? Just trying to be helpful!

When you know you are right and you do point out that they are wrong, what percentage of the time are they grateful? Zero! But what percentage of the time do you do it? 100%! Hmmm. There’s something irrational about this. This is because we tend to take their disagreement personally, so we act unconsciously and automatically, and that only makes things worse. Fortunately there are better ways.

If all this sounds familiar and these approaches make sense, then consider contacting Rob and Stephen to discuss how they could help your organization. Contact them at 713-305-5117 or get more information on their web site at: www.resource-i.com

Ask Ms. GeekSpeak

By: Laurie Weaver
Member Columnist

Have you been trying to work with Information Technology, but your initiatives and patience grind to a screeching halt? Do the terms they use sound like so much gobbledygook? Do you ever get the sneaking feeling that IT professionals just may, in fact, have come from Mars? If so, you've probably run headlong into some common "GeekSpeak" roadblocks. The aim of this ongoing column is to help forms professionals and technology professionals overcome roadblocks by gaining mutual understanding, vocabulary, and context. So if you need help with specifics, or if you'd just like to know more about a techie topic, email or post any and all questions to Ask Ms. GeekSpeak. This month's topic: "Online color accessibility."

Dear Ms. GeekSpeak, my Web developer doesn’t think I should use the same color palette my print designer came up with because of W3C accessibility. What does that mean?

Glad you asked that! Let’s start with the W3C. This is a GeekSpeak acronym that’s always useful to know when communicating with Web developers. It’s short for “World Wide Web Consortium” – note the 3 Ws prior to the C – hence W3C. The World Wide Web Consortium has been around since 1994. In their own words, it’s “an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.”

You may learn more about the W3C and its initiatives by checking out their extensive website at http://www.w3.org/

Prior to the W3C and the evolution of Web standards, the wild and woolly Internet used to be a tangle of technologies and workarounds cobbled together by hapless Web designers in pursuit of their clients’ sites “looking the same” on all Web browsers. “Looking the same” on all browsers can be very tricky (in fact impossible) because until recently most browsers displayed coded Web pages very differently from each other. This meant that a page that looked great on Internet Explorer might not look so nifty on Firefox or vice versa. It also meant Web developers and designers had to learn several tricks and shims to account for the way various browsers did things. Before the progress of Web standards, this was an inefficient and annoying state of affairs since the very tricks that worked previously may well be those that will break your site in the future!

OK, so now we know that Web standards have begun to tame browser behavior, but just how does that impact our designer’s choice of color? One of the primary tenets of Web standards is that information should be accessible to everyone. This includes folks (like Ms. GeekSpeak) who have difficulty seeing. One Web design guideline that is well known along that line is that one should add code that includes alternate text descriptions along with the images on the Web so that software used by the visually impaired to “read the screen” will know what the images are conveying. A lesser known, and even lesser employed, technique is to test for contrast between all fonts and background colors. One needn’t be legally blind to have a hard time reading colors that “blend together” online. This might also be the result of low lighting conditions, tired eyes, color blindness, or age-related conditions in which our eyes just don’t focus as well as they used to.

One way to test is to view all of your proposed online pages and images after setting the monitor to grayscale. It can really be surprising to see what is easily read or not. Another way to check out proposed color schemes is to try one of the online “color checkers.” This simple one developed by Canadian Web designer Jonathan Snook is one of my favorites.

http://www.snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html

Play with it awhile. Don’t take its results as gospel, but it will give you the flavor of how “taupe text on a smoky blue background” just might not be such a great combo online.

In case this has really sparked your interest, check out this great article by Roger Johansson. In it, he gives a great overview of color contrast and provides a great list of resources for further color checking.

http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200709/10_colour_contrast_checking_tools_to_improve_the_accessibility_of_your_design/

If you take the time to explore and apply the concept of accessible color contrast to all of your online tools, content, and form designs, more of your users will be able to see the information and directions you’ve so carefully crafted. Now if we could just get the users to actually read them! As always, if you’d like to know more about color, the W3C, Web standards, or any other “geeky” word or topic, post here, or email Ask Ms. GeekSpeak.

Ask Ms. GeekSpeak

By: Laurie Weaver
Member Columnist

Have you been trying to work with Information Technology, but your initiatives and patience grind to a screeching halt? Do the terms they use sound like so much gobbledygook? Do you ever get the sneaking feeling that IT professionals just may, in fact, have come from Mars? If so, you've probably run headlong into some common "GeekSpeak" roadblocks. The aim of this ongoing column is to help forms professionals and technology professionals overcome roadblocks by gaining mutual understanding, vocabulary, and context. So if you need help with specifics, or if you'd just like to know more about a techie topic, email or post any and all questions to Ask Ms. GeekSpeak. This month's topic:"Radio buttons vs. checkboxes in Acroforms "

Dear Ms. GeekSpeak, Why can’t I tab between the individual radio buttons in fillable PDFs?

This is a question I hear quite often. It usually arises when one wishes to design an online form using the proper interface widget to represent an exclusive (one or the other) choice for the user.

Before we move on, let’s go through the meaning of some new GeekSpeak terms. You’ve had a taste of two of them in the above sentence: interface and widget. Another new term is GUI (pronounced “Gooey”). GUI stands for Graphical User Interface. In short, it is a visual way for the user to send commands to the computer. Notice that GUI includes another one of our GeekSpeak terms, interface. In this context, interface means the way the user interacts with the individual graphical element – also known as the widget.  Menus, scrollbars, dialog boxes, text fields, and buttons are all examples of GUI widgets. In today’s topic, we will be focusing on two specific GUI widgets, radio buttons and checkboxes.

Consider that radio buttons on a form look different from checkboxes. They have a different GUI. Radio buttons are round and, when clicked, usually have a solid circle inside to indicate selection. Checkboxes are square and typically have check marks or Xs to indicate selection. So what’s the big deal? To a user, the shape and appearance of a GUI widget have implications for the widget’s known behavior. The user expects radio buttons to mean an exclusive choice, and checkboxes to mean the ability to make multiple choices, one choice, or no choice. When we use checkboxes that mimic radio button behavior on forms, we are using a visual interface that is contrary to expected widget behavior. This is usually not recommended for usability.   

In that case, you might ask, why not just use radio buttons when we need an exclusive choice on our PDF forms? The answer is that when it comes to PDF forms, especially Acroforms, there are a couple of reasons why form designers might not.

Reason 1: Print design compatibility. Radio buttons are standard online GUI widgets, but in print, we usually don’t have radio buttons (outside of standardized testing with number 2 pencils). Acroform PDFs are closer to their print counterparts than pure online forms in many ways. We would love our users to always fill out and submit our Acroforms, or at least fill out and print them, but the fact is that many users still print out the forms and write on them. Also, individual Acroforms often have a background that came from a designed print file.

Reason 2: Accessibility. Many users like to tab through form field elements and use the space bar to make selections. This isn’t possible with the radio button GUI widget we have available as forms designers with Acroforms (at least not without significant code manipulation – and even then you can cause more problems than you solve).

So this brings us back to the original question, Why can’t I tab between the individual radio buttons in fillable PDFs?”

To better illustrate this, I will give a brief interactive tutorial based on a sample PDF I’ve prepared. To follow along with the tutorial portion, either click this link to open a second browser window or right-click to download the PDF, then open it.

A. Field list: Examine the screenshot of the Fields list displayed in the upper right of the PDF.

We’ve been discussing the term widget, meaning an individual type of GUI object like a menu or a checkbox. But widget in Acroforms also means an individual instance of a like-named field. Notice our sample Fields list for this PDF shows two field instances named “radio” – radio#0 and radio#1. I named each radio button widget “radio”. Acrobat then automatically assigned each field object its index position. The index position is based on field creation order. The first created field of a given name is internally assigned index 0, the next of the same name is index 1, the next is index 2 and so on. This index position is then displayed in the Fields list as a numeral following a number sign after the field name, such as we see with radio#0, radio#1.

Goodness, we are getting geeky now! Why do you need to know this? Because it impacts the tab order for radio buttons only. As the user tabs, if no radio button widget in a set is selected, Acrobat is programmed to go to the radio button widget assigned to index#0 and to skip over all other widgets of the same name. Also, if a radio button widget is selected, Acrobat is programmed to skip over all of the non-selected widgets.

B. Sample 1: Radio buttons

Let’s take a closer look at our radio buttons in Sample 1. The radio button widgets look round. When you open the PDF, neither one is selected. (You can tell because no solid circle is in the middle of either.)

1. Click at the top of the PDF to deselect any field, then type the Tab key three times. You will see the current selection indicator, which looks like a dotted line around each field rectangle, skip over radio widget 1 and go straight to the “Click for ‘radio’ current value” button.

2. Click on the button. It tells you that no widget is selected and that the value of the radio button set is “Off” (the default value for non-selected). Click OK.

3. Click at the top of the PDF again. Now tab 2 times. The current selection indicator should be on widget 0. Let’s say you wish to select this one via keyboard. Go ahead and use the space bar. It works! Oops, you really meant widget 1. Try space bar to deselect. Doesn’t work. Try tabbing to widget 1. Doesn’t work.Try tabbing past the radio buttons and SHIFT tabbing back. Still doesn’t work. How about the arrow keys? If you tab to the radio button set, you can use the arrow keys to change widget selection. Oh, brother!

Here is the accessibility problem with Acroforms radio buttons. One must use the mouse or know about using arrow keys to go between radio button widgets – a procedure not needed for checkbox widgets.

4. To illustrate the differences between fields and widgets, I created some JavaScript functionality you can play with. Since they are named the same, Acrobat considers both “radio” widgets one field object — but it also considers them individual members of that field object. We can programmatically address them as a group or as individuals. To see this in action, hold down your mouse on the button called “radio 0 Green and radio 1 Red,” then let it up again. You will see the border colors of each radio widget change, then go back to black. The code for Mouse Down and for Mouse Up is listed right below the button.

Notice that the Mouse Down code needs two lines, one for each widget because I want each individual widget to have its own border color. I call each widget in the code by its name and by its index position following a period. So radio.0 in my code is talking to radio#0.

For the Mouse Up code, I want all widgets in the set to go back to black, so I don’t need to address them by both name and by index. I can just use the field name for “all” since both widgets have the name “radio.”

C. Sample 2: Checkbox widgets named the same with the same Export Value

1. You can repeat all the experiments with this set and see how it differs from the radio button set. Note, you can tab and use the space bar for every member of the checkbox set all the time. Because both widgets have the same value, selecting one selects both and vice versa.

D. Sample 3: Checkbox widgets that behave as radio buttons

They have the same name but separate Export Values.

1. Play around and see how these all work. Have fun!

There you have it, more about radio widgets than you ever thought you would know! As always, if you’d like to know more about widgets, Acroforms, or any “geeky” word or topic, post here, or email Ask Ms. GeekSpeak.

Book Series Continues on User Interface Design

By: Margaret Tassin, CFSP, CDC
VP, Programs

BFMA is extremely fortunate to have a long-standing relationship with one of the most respected authorities on user interface design, Mr. Bill Galitz. He has recently published the third edition of "The Essential Guide to User Interface Design" (2007, Wiley Publishing Company, Indianapolis, Indiana, 857 pages).

Wilbert (Bill) O. Galitz is an internationally respected consultant, author, and instructor with a long and illustrious career in human factors and user-interface design. For many years he conducted a screen design course for BFMA. Click here for a complete biography.

The article below is the eighth in a series and is derived from the author’s most recent book, "The Essential Guide to User Interface Design".  You can order this book from BFMA.

Here Bill discusses the human action cycle.

The Human Action Cycle

The human action cycle is a psychological model that describes how people interact with computer systems. It was presented by Norman (1988) and adapted by Stone et al. (2005) whose model is the basis for this discussion.

People tend to be goal oriented, wanting to achieve a specific objective when taking an action or performing a task. Actions and tasks can be cognitive or physical in nature. The action cycle consists of three stages: goal formation, execution of activities to achieve the goal, and evaluation of the results of the action. The cycle flows as follows:

1) A goal is formed. A cognitive activity, appropriate objectives, or an objective, are thought out and defined. The goal may be to type and print a letter, or to find a good price for a specific electronic device.

2) An execution plan is devised and implemented. This phase consists of three stages, the first two being cognitive in nature, the third being physical.

A) General methods to achieve the desired goals are decided upon. Typing a letter requires using a computer’s word processing function. Finding a best price requires using the Internet to do some comparison-shopping.

B) The action sequence is planned. Typing a letter requires opening the word processor, retrieving a blank document, and typing the letter. Best-price determination equires doing an Internet search to locate possible sources of the desired equipment, accessing the Web sites of these sources, and finding the equipment prices.

C) The actions are performed. The various available computer controls, such as the keyboard and mouse, are used to perform the planned tasks.

3) The results of the actions taken are evaluated. This is another cognitive phase that also consists of three stages.

A) The resulting output is perceived and understood. The letters and symbols typed appear on the screen. Prices of equipment are provided on the website being viewed.

B) The outcome is interpreted based upon expectations. Is the letter formatted properly and its content accurate and complete? Are the prices displayed for the proper equipment?

C) The results are compared to the formulated goals. Has the letter been printed correctly? Is the price a good price? A failure to achieve formulated goals may cause the action cycle’s goals to be modified or performed again.

Multiple iterations of this cycle are possible. Simple action cycles may last only a few seconds, and others may take hours to complete. In the execution phase numerous ways may exist to fulfill one’s goal. Interface design should enable the human action cycles for tasks to be performed as quickly and accurately as possible.

References.

Norman, D. A., (1988). The Design of Everyday Things. New York, Doubleday/Currency Ed.

Stone, D., Jarrett, C., Woodroffe, M. and Minocha, S. (2005). User Interface Evaluation and Design. San Francisco, CA, Morgan Kaufmann.