What is the best enterprise planning tool?

Complex enterprise systems: How do you introduce a usability study participant to a complex tool in a study?

• We're conducting a usability study on an enterprise system, which has comparable complexity to an electronic medical record (EMR). The creators of the system insist users will get training and therefore should be given some type of orientation prior to attempting tasks in the usability study. How do you introduce a complex tool in a study without turning it into a training session?

• Answer:

  You have a couple of options. You can do the sessions without training. You can do the sessions with training. You can do the sessions after giving a briefing. One important thing is that these are participants who are motivated to do the work, regardless of what the system is. If you do the sessions without training, you're likely to find out what is most important to spend time on in training rather than the real usability of the system. There's a place for that. If you do the sessions after training the participants, you'll be getting a more realistic sense of what's usable and what's not. But you'll probably also want to observe the training so you can see what's covered and what questions people had. If people really will get training before they start using the design in real life, this is the best way to go. You could skip the full training and just give a briefing on the major features for the anticipated tasks. As you know, it all comes back to the purpose for the test. What are you trying to find out? In the old days when everyone needed to be trained on everything before they could use it, it was very common to train the participants before a study. You might want to look up some papers from the early 1980s about this. The ACM Digital Library is probably a good source.