Strategic Usability: Introducing Usability into Organisations

ABSTRACT

Usability may now be practised by a large number of software developers, but has yet to gain wide acceptance. Communicating the value of usability must happen across multiple levels of an organisation, and requires speaking several "languages". This practical, hands-on tutorial will cover techniques for convincing management or potential clients of the value of usability, in terms each group understands. It will examine what is required to develop a usability strategy for a whole organisation to finding data to convince stakeholders of a single usability activity.

Keywords

Strategic usability, usability strategies, cost-justification, communicating usability data.

© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.

COURSE OVERVIEW

It is an ongoing source of frustration for usability professionals to continuously have to justify the value of their activities. Usability has yet to gain wide acceptance in software development practises.

Communicating the value of usability across multiple levels of an organisation requires speaking several "languages". IT departments, business areas and users each have different, often seemingly conflicting, agendas. They are measured differently, focus on different objectives and view the organisation from different perspectives. To accept usability as having value for them, each area must be targeted and the benefits of usability clearly presented (even "sold") in terms they understand.

Usability is successfully integrated into an organisation when a strategy is developed which leads to key usability benefits and supports overall business objectives. Organisational usability looks at people, processes and tools across an organisation, analysing organisational needs, business objectives and culture. This information reveals barriers and opportunities which can hinder or facilitate usability acceptance. From this knowledge, an appropriate usability strategy can be determined.

A business objective may be to reduce overall costs, increase sales, or simply to provide better customer service. Taking a high level view, strategic usability aims to make software tools work for the whole business by assessing the usability of individual systems in the context of other systems, processes and people. It not only aligns usability goals to the needs of the users, but also to the needs of the IT department and the business through the development of a 'total business' strategy. For example, it considers the methods used to develop new software which may lead to cost savings, as well as ways to create more usable systems.

A broad range of opportunities are also considered, such as change management, alignment with related initiatives and communicating the value and achievements of usability activities on an ongoing basis.

This tutorial will cover techniques for convincing management or potential clients of the value of usability. The key is to understand your organisation in terms of where usability can make a difference, and to present those opportunities in terms understood by each target audience. Using actual case studies and exercises, this tutorial will show how to identify key organisational opportunities, as well as barriers. We will look at how and where to collect data to support the usability initiative, such as benchmarking, leveraging other initiatives (such as total quality, reduced training costs etc.), cost-justification, and corporate strategies, to develop a strong message communicating the value of usability specific to target organisations.

This is an intermediate-level, full day tutorial.

AUDIENCE

Experienced usability professionals, user interface designers, developers and management who are working to improve the acceptance of usability activities within their organisations, whether for in-house or commercial software development; consultants who wish to convince potential clients.

INSTRUCTORS

Sarah Bloomer is co-founder and director of The Hiser Group. Sarah has 9 years experience consulting in user interface design and usability in both the USA and Australia. In addition to consulting in user interface design, usability training and style guide development, Sarah has been leading Hiser's organisational usability projects and initiatives since 1994. Sarah has a masters in interactive software design from New York University (USA)

Rachel Croft is a usability consultant at The Hiser Group, responsible for defining organisational usability methodologies. With over 5 years experience in the field of HCI in Australia, Europe and the UK, Rachel brings experience in ethnographic methods and sociological issues to organisational usability. Rachel has developed two corporate usability strategies and supported several others. Rachel has a PhD in usability evaluation at the University of Manchester (UK).

Helen Kieboom is a usability consultant at The Hiser Group, and has over 7 years experience in human factors. Since 1994, Helen has worked on three of Hiser's key organisational usability projects, including building a usability team at Telstra and developing two corporate usability strategies for large organisations. Helen has also designed a cost-justification approach for helping convince management of the value of usability. Helen has a masters in HCI from Swinburne University of Technology (Australia).

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