Institutionalization of Usability A Step by Step Guide | Date: 19 January 2011, 09:14
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This book is a guide to making usability a routine practice within an enterprise, be it commercial or government. Every organization has special needs: There is no one simple approach that fits all organizations. What this book provides, however, is a solid methodology, not for usability engineering (that's been done before and exists in various forms), but for the part that is truly missing--the institutionalization of usability. This institutionalization methodology is not new. It is simply a synthesis of the best practices and insights from hundreds of companies in the forefront of this effort. This book will give you insights into the appropriate institutionalization activities, infrastructure, and staffing. It will give you tips on how to recognize quality, and how to time and sequence components. The combination of elements is unique for each organization, but this book can be a road map, a mine detector, and a shopping list for you. There is a misconception that the institutionalization of usability will simply be a matter of doing more of what we have done in the past. A simple analogy will illustrate why this is a misconception. Imagine that we are back in pre-industrial times and that we have a small hut in the forest where we have made a primitive brick forge to produce swords. We create the swords by using a hand bellows and then hammering the metal against a rock. We find the swords to be very useful and realize we need one for everyone in our army. We need thousands of swords. Is our solution to build lots of little huts? Of course not. We need a factory. Today, the usability engineering process is still being done in a hut. Usability engineers are typically thrown alone into a large organization and left unsupported. There is no established user-centric methodology or set of tools. Every questionnaire is reinvented from scratch. Every deliverable is conceived and crafted by hand. Then we wonder why user-centered design can seem inefficient! It should be no surprise if the results are not consistent, not repeatable, and not reliable. Currently, good usability practitioners know how to make software usable. We have a billion dollars worth of research and 50 years of practice. But, the usability industry has not matured nearly as much as the software development industry. Usability professionals rarely complete a systematic and repeatable methodology. They rarely work with a complete toolset and set of standards. They are rarely formally trained to complete all the tasks in their area of responsibility. They rarely have comprehensive quality assurance. And perhaps of greatest concern, they are rarely integrated into the routine development process. We know how to make an application usable, but we don't generally know how to put these techniques into practice in a systematic way that is efficient and works well within an organization. This is the next frontier in the usability field and it is also the focus of this book. This book provides insights into the deep changes necessary to put user-centered design to work routinely within your organization. This book also provides a guided series of activities and milestones that will chart your course to fully mature and institutionalized usability engineering. This book is about how to create a usability "factory." It is about how to create a reliable and repeatable process. It is about how to ensure efficiency. Following this process means that usability efforts will have to be done differently than before. Just as a computer programmer would never suggest going back to the early days "in the garage," no usability expert should accept the lack of a systematic methodology and professional infrastructure. Usability practitioners of the future will look back with amusement at our current piecemeal approach. This book is a guide to this more mature usability engineering process. It is time for us to get serious about the institutionalization of usability because usability has become extremely important. Usability is now the key differentiator in the information age. Imagine the CEO of a large insurance company standing before her stockholders and telling them there is bad news this year. The company has been vanquished by the competition . . . because the competition has better laptop computers. Seems like an unlikely excuse? That's because hardware is now a commodity. It takes serious work to create good hardware, but everyone has it, and it does not represent a differentiator between companies. You just buy adequate hardware. Hardware was the first wave of the information age. In the 1980s, it was a challenge to get adequate hardware, and it was an important differentiator that could determine corporate success. But at the end of the 1980s, the software industry realized that "software sells the hardware," and good software became the differentiator. Companies who could create stable software with the right functionality won big. This was the second wave. Now in the new millennium, software has become a commodity. Everyone can create a database. Everyone can get connectivity. Children can code in HTML. Software is no longer a differentiator. Software coding is being done with better and better power tools and being outsourced to countries with lower labor costs. We are now entering the third wave of the information age. What is the remaining differentiator in this information age? It is the ability to build practical , useful , usable , and satisfying applications and web sites. Very few companies do this well, because this requires creating a full and integrated usability engineering capability. As you will see throughout this book, the journey to routine usability requires a serious effort and the path has many pitfalls. The Organization of This Book This book contains four major sections, or phases . The first phase, "Startup," covers the process of alerting the organization to the need to make usability a routine internal capability. It then outlines the steps toward finding an executive champion and consultant to support the initial process. The "Setup" phase explores the essential core infrastructure of methods, templates, standards, and internal training, " Organization," the third phase, describes the need to properly staff the factory you have built. You will need a small, centralized, internal organization to support usability engineering. If you are a large organization, you will need usability practitioners reporting within your project teams. The Organization phase then ends by outlining the importance of applying your usability methods to a set of projects and discussing challenges that occur as resources are stretched (as often happens at this point). The last phase, "Long-Term Operations," characterizes the established operation of the central usability group. The Audience for This Book This book enables leaders to bring modern usability principles into everyday practice. It is not an introduction to usability or a guide to good design. This book is for everyone who is working to integrate usability-engineering practices into their organizations. If you are an executive or manager within an organization, then you will want to focus on the steps you can take to get institutionalization started. You will want to concentrate on a high-level strategy, and deciding on the staff and resources to fully implement the institutionalization process. Pay particular attention to the chapters on being an executive champion and creating a strategy. You are the one who must move your organization from piecemeal usability to a managed process. If you are currently part of a usability team that is struggling to make usability routine, you may need to look at the process of institutionalization in a new light. Perhaps you are struggling because you can't do it alone. You may need to focus on finding an executive champion to give power to the effort. If you are part of a large organization, all the steps in the institutionalization method will be critical, and you will likely have to involve many others along the way. If you are with a small or medium size organization, then you may be able to do much of this on your own. The steps will still be appropriate for you, even if they are scaled down. No matter who you are, or how far along you are in the institutionalization process (even if it is at the beginning), if you are considering how to institutionalize usability in your company, this book is for you. If you have decided to proceed to build usability into your software design practices, this book is required reading. Whether you are an executive leading the process, a manager supporting the transition, or a staff member advising others and working on usability issues, this book will guide you to success.
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