Shipping eService

The shipping application provides detailed information to ships in European waters. It is an advance on existing systems. Ship crews are likely to have used similar interfaces and the consortium were required to use standard formats for several elements of the application.

The Consortium was aware of the need for a usability evaluation to be undertaken and had conducted trials on ships with questionnaire responses available to assess the usability of the application, with questions in the questionnaire covering a wide range of topics. However, there was a lack of specific usability knowledge within the consortium and the analysis of the questionnaires may have been affected by the wording used in the questionnaires.

The project was almost at the end when Tenuta became involved.

Assistance Provided

The consortium was unaware of the assistance available from Tenuta earlier in their project, but was interested in our involvement when contact was made. While accessibility was not considered a problem for this application, they were aware that good usability of the application was of high importance due to the safety critical nature of shipping activities.

Following a telephone call and several emails to discuss the benefits of assistance from Tenuta on the usability of the application, an onsite meeting was arranged. Despite the project being almost complete, the consortium agreed that, while changes could not be made under the current project, an expert usability assessment was of benefit for future iterations of the application.

Tenuta conducted a one day expert evaluation of the application onsite. Following an introduction of the application by the project leader, a usability expert and a programmer assessed the application using design heuristics and scenarios of use.

The functionality of the application was apparent. In direct comparison with existing systems it appeared to offer distinct advantages. Novice users of the application were likely to be able to work out how to use it relatively easily suggesting it has good learnability. In addition, the application offers some necessary feedback to users, but more feedback is required to assist users in the more complex aspects of the application. Good use of labels to present measures of values was apparent. Support documentation is available in hard copy, but was not available on the system to assist novice users who may need to refer to help documentation quickly if the hard copies are misplaced.

A number of minor problems were identified, most notably a lack of consistency of formatting across the site, reducing the effectiveness and efficiency of the application. There were also a a number of more serious issues that could be altered to improve the application’s usability.

While accessibility was not a focus for the evaluation, it was clear that the application of some guidelines to improve the accessibility was necessary. For example, there was a strong reliance on colour to convey information. While it was argued that maritime personnel are not likely to have any form of colour blindness, reliance on colour alone to convey information was questioned.

The most important recommended changes were to:

  • Ensure consistency of formats for time, date and other information
  • Ensure information on axes of graphs of similar data were always presented in the same scale to avoid confusion
  • Ensure fields that should not be editable are protected, and those that should be editable are clearly marked

A thorough report of the findings and recommendations was provided to the project to assist them with future development of the application.

Project Comments

"We thank you again for the work you have done … It is very valuable and useful to us and provides a detailed list of elements to have to improve in XXX … The usability audit provided by Tenuta was very good and very efficient … it highlighted a number of improvements to the user interface, which do not represent any technical difficulties but which can provide a more professional working environment"

Final Report

The following report of the findings and recommendations from the usability audit of the Shipping eService may be of interest:

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