SUMMARY
Do you have to fight to get funding for your
HCIactivities? Does your organization pay
lip-serviceto usability? This SIG will help
identify tools andtechniques that have been
successfully used ingetting smaller
organizations to recognize the needand value
of HCI studies and in particular
usabilityevaluations.
KEY WORDS
HCI Contributions
Organizational Effectiveness
HCI Tools & Techniques
ISSUE
Many practitioners in CHI community
areconstantly faced with an uphill battle of
justifyingtheir existence and fighting for
limited resources.Since this is not a new
problem, some concludethat it is an
occupational hazard.
Those of us lucky enough to be employed
byorganizations whose software is used by
millions ofpeople may not have this problem,
as theseorganizations recognize the value of
usability inthe success of their product. But
those of usworking in smaller organizations
are constantlystruggling to prove the value of
our contributions.Usability has turned out to
be a great marketingploy; unfortunately is
sometimes ends right there.
GOALS
The goals of this SIG will be to share
tools,techniques, threats, cost-effective
arguments and allother approaches that
people have used to showthe importance of
HCI contributions.
We will not spend much time defining the
problem: it is unfortunately too well known.
We will however, attempt to list and explore
techniques that have been successfully
employed.
Some of these techniques include:
- Getting managers to sit at the keyboard and
attempt to operate the software.
- Showing a video clip of a usability
evaluation with a struggling operator.
- Prototype alternative interfaces to current
products.
- Learning more about the domain than
developers, thereby influencing the design.
- Dangle the possibility of a U.I. patent,
helping to secure the position of the product
in the market.
- Citing Claire Marie Karat's work on cost-
effectiveness of usability evaluations.
- Wearing a Don Norman mask.
The participants should come away with at
leastseveral techniques to try in their
organizations.If there is sufficient interest and
innovative ideas,a workshop using creative
problem solvingmethods can be called in
subsequent years todevelop new approaches to
this eternal problem.
