Usability/User-Centered Design Strategy Consulting
Issue addressed
“We know that usability is of strategic importance. Where is our company on 'usability', and what do we need to do so we can be more effective at building usable products?”
Your challenge: Your company needs usability (not just your product)
The real key to your company building user-friendly products is not simply a matter of hiring or outsourcing usability services for your product's next release. Ultimately, usability, and the processes it requires, needs solid support at the executive level. This is where ease-of-use must be understood as an essential strategy for meeting business goals.
But a "usability blessing" may not come easily, nor will this blessing magically allow your company to ship easy-to-use and effective products. Company culture and processes must be understood and realigned where necessary. Small successes are required before the value is understood, and then the necessary commitment is made by management and product teams to take usability and user-centered design processes seriously.
If it's not introduced carefully, usability can become a bad word around your company. It may be considered more a management flavor of the month mandate than a strategic way of developing successful products.
I can help you better align your management strategies and your development teams' capabilities and processes with practices that have been shown to deliver easy-to-use solutions. The general approach involves:
- determining the current state of your organization's culture, capabilities, processes and metrics, product management processes, vendors, and partnerships regarding usability and UCD processes
- determining the current state of your products and where you need your future product offerings to be with respect to usability and user-experience benchmarks (e.g., Gomez or other analyst ratings, business metrics, usability and user-experience metrics, competitive benchmarks)
- determining where your in-house processes and capabilities need to be in order to reach your goals
- making and implementing recommendations that will close the gap between your current in-house processes and capabilities and those required to meet your product's benchmark targets, and where training or outsourcing should be involved.
With a strategy that works for your company:
- the relevance of usability for your business goals will be understood and measurable
- your product design and usability efforts will be better aligned to deliver your business goals
- your company will accumulate strategic information that will help you plan and deliver even more effective solutions
- I was a member of the original group at IBM that defined and then introduced User-Centered Design processes to IBM development labs corporate-wide (See the book
User-Centered Design: An integrated approach for a description of that work)
- I was the corporate discipline lead of Usability Research and Analysis for Immersant, a consulting and professional services firm in Internet strategy, technology integration, and site design and development, primarily for Fortune 1000 financial services companies.
Last
update: May 07, 2002
(c) 2002 Don Hameluck Usability Consulting Inc.
