Interview with Elizabeth Rosenzweig, Founder of World Usability Day

Elizabeth Rosenzweig is the driving force and founder of the Usability Professional’s Association World Usability Day, a day that seeks to recognize and promote usability as a means to making services and products easier to access and simpler to use.  The World Usability Day or “WUD” for short takes place on the 2nd Thursday of the month of November.

Elizabeth Rosenzweig

In her “spare” time,  Elizabeth leads the Bubble Mountain user experience consulting firm and is also an author, a multi-patent holder and mom.

Q1. What’s your background? Where did you go to school, what subjects interested you?

My background is in art and photography. I studied photography and fine arts at Goddard College in Vermont and worked as a freelance photography and graphic designer Fellowship for a few years when I graduated. I had a Fellowship at the Sun Valley Center for Arts and Humanities before returning to Vermont to go the freelance work.

I finally decided to go to graduate school and ended up at the Visible Language Workshop (WLW), The Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

I loved art, art history, sociology, psychology, english and poetry. I studied graphic design and then computer graphics at MIT.

In undergraduate school I was trained to take machines apart and put them back together. I remember once when a printing press didn’t work, we, my peers, took it apart to see what was wrong.

It took us a while to diagnose the problem and put the press back together, but it taught me a valuable lesson-that a machine is only a machine and that people are the one who make a machine work.

In graduate school I learned to work with digital technology and found that made me feel that we, people and users of machines, had even more control then we thought. By using a programming language to talk to a machine, I found that I could control the machine in ways I had never imagined. This was a real paradigm shift for me.

Q2. How did you get into the usability field?

Actually ,it was a bit accidental. I was studying computer graphics at MIT in 1985 and realized that no-one was doing advocacy for users. Then I started to do programming when I got out of graduate school and did a bit of design when I started putting users in front of the applications I was working on.

I heard people saying that they felt stupid when they saw a computer, and that struck me as wrong. How can a machine make a person feel stupid? Shouldn’t it be the other way around.

Since my background is in photography and printmaking, I had a lot of experience with different types of machines and was comfortable working with them. I found myself getting outraged that people would get so intimidated by a machine and I wanted to change that.

I started by creating a system for photographers and artists. At the VLW we had a system that allowed users to create amazing imagery. It was called “Sys” and was a precursor to Photoshop.

Sys was better then photoshop because it had evolved over the years by students using it, creating new functionality and iterating. Sys ran on a minicomputer and the output was either slides or a Polaroid large format printer.

Sys really opened my eyes to the capabilities of digital imagery but it was very hard to use. I decided that my thesis would be to create an easier system for users so they could access the power of the computer.

Once I graduated I started to work as a Graphic Design specialist. In those days, 1985, there was not really a field of user-centered design but many of us were doing those jobs.

I took the developers on my team out into the field to watch users do their jobs and then we would all go back and figure out how to design a system that was easy for those users to work. Over the years SIGCHI and then UPA developed and I was happy to have a peer group.

Q3. What is it about usability that you most enjoy, or find most rewarding?

I find it meaningful when I can make a difference. I enjoy helping people overcome their fear of technology and making them feel more powerful in terms of their use of tools. I enjoy developing tools and systems that help people do what they need and want to do, in a fun and easy way.

It is especially rewarding to work in a field that is making a difference, such as one of recent projects for National Science Foundation (NSF).

This is the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), the largest project I ever worked on, whose goal is to pull together data from several fields, including oceanography, Nasa satellite and land seismic networks to create a cyberinfrastructure.

This was exciting because one of the goals was to create an easy to use system that would allow anyone to view data about the earth. The team started with eliciting user requirements from stakeholders and users. It was exciting to be part of a team that was walking the walk and talking the talk about user centered design.

Q4. You founded World Usability Day, why did you feel Usability needed a “day?”

I wanted to raise awareness about the problems of technology products and services so that the average citizen would know that they don’t have to make do with things that don’t work.

I wanted stop people from looking at machines and feeling stupid. I also wanted to bring the profession to parts of the world that had never heard of it before.

It is interesting to see that raising awareness is a slow process but spreading the profession is happening faster then I anticipated.

World Usability Day is a big part of the new success the field of user centered design has enjoyed in countries like India, Brazil, Russia, Poland, Romania, Peru, Philippines, Canary Islands, Iceland and many others.

In addition World Usability Day has helped to solidify the field in many parts of Europe and Australia.

Q5. World Usability Day is on the second Thursday of November, why that day, is there significance to it?

We tried very hard to find a day that would work all around the world. We wanted to balance all the conferences that took place in the spring and summer, as well as major vacation times. We tried to avoid major holidays like Christmas, Easter, Jewish High Holidays, Ramadan, and other important days such as major elections, bank holidays, etc.

We did a survey for all the volunteers and found only a few days that worked for everyone. It turns out that some holidays run on a lunar calendar and therefore move the dates. We tried to give a lot of leeway for those and came up with the current date.

Q6. In the past, some high-profile personalities in the usability industry have claimed that the World Usability Day charter and world usability day itself are irrelevant. How do you respond to people who maintain the charter is overkill, or that every day should be usability day and no specific day is needed?

I have talked with a few of them, and while some high profile personalities will always want to create controversy a few have changed their initial position.

I know of at least one very high profile personality who now sees that having a day for people to focus on the importance of user-centered design has opened up the field in places like India and many other countries.

He has said that the value of this message and raising awareness is very good for the field in general, and of course, for some countries specifically.

Q7. World Usability Day has been expanding greatly, you now have at least 43 Countries participating in World Usability Day events, why do you think there’s been such an increase in interest in usability?

The timing is right and people see that they don’t have to put up with products and services that don’t work right. People like to get together and they like structure.

World Usability Day has created a structure that allows people to share ideas, and plan regular events around important themes in user centered design.

In addition, World Usability Day has been able to go beyond any one organization to pull people together for something greater than themselves or their local group.

Also, we have provided a great and workable infrastructure for organizers to stay involved each year and build on their past work.

Q8. Your firm, Bubble Mountain Consulting, provides a pretty broad array of user centered design services. What are most of your clients asking for these days, what (if any) are the trends in existing or new service requests you are seeing?

In the past two years I have had many requests for contextual inquiry, persona and use case development and writing of user requirements.

There is always work in doing website design and redesign. I find that design is a staple of my practice, but I enjoy the full process.

I think the trend to really understanding the user is getting momentum and that is exciting, since that is where our profession can make a difference.

Prior to that I had been doing more innovation and invention, which is a lot of fun.

I think with the economy going down the work has gotten more concrete and specific around product revision and smaller applications.

Q9. What’s next for you? What are your looking forward to accomplishing in the future?

I want to get World Usability Day on the calendar of the United Nations.

If you look at the calendar of the UN you can see many dates such as World Book and Copyright Day, World Intellectual Property Day and World Television Day, in addition to all the humanitarian commemorations.

The value of getting recognized by the United Nations is more visibility and connection to other important events in the world. I think this would help us make the impact we are looking for.

If anyone wants to be a part of that, there are a few ways to help. The first is to go to World Usability Day and sign our charter.

The second way to help is to contact me and work with our committee to organize UN Ambassadors to sponsor our petition.

Thank you Elizabeth Rosenzweig!

To learn how you can participate in World Usability Day visit the Get Involved page.  You can follow WUD blog to stay current on the latest happenings with World Usability Day and to learn about events in your area.

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Interview with Dr. Deborah J Mayhew, Internationally Acclaimed Author, Lecturer & Usability Consultant

Among Dr. Mayhew’s many accomplishments, she is the author of several influential Usability books and has been applying her significant usability engineering expertise for Fortune 100 companies since 1986. Dr. Mayhew holds a Ph.D in Cognitive Psychology from Tufts University, an M.A. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Denver and a B.A. in Psychology from Brown University. Her books, “The Usability Engineering Lifecycle” and “Cost-Justifying Usability” are in my opinion two classics of Usability and User-Centered design.

1. What’s your background? Where did you go to school, what subjects interested you?

I majored in Psychology in college, discovering Cognitive Psychology late in my college years. Other subfields of psychology had interested me, but when I finally encountered Cognitive Psychology, I knew I had found my calling. What could be more fascinating than the internal workings of the human mind?!

I then applied to graduate school in Experimental Psychology, went to the University of Denver for my Masters where my initial Advisor was a researcher in intelligence testing, and finished my PhD at Tufts University.

My area of specialization was human problem solving, but I also studied general cognition, perception, developmental cognitive psychology, statistics, and neuro-psychology among other subtopics. My research assistantships involved work at the Colorado State Penitentiary doing IQ testing, and work in a primate lab tracking the social behaviors of macaque monkeys. Both my Masters and PhD theses were on topics in human problem solving.

2. How did you get into the usability field?

My graduate education was almost entirely funded by grant money. But one summer while at Tufts working towards my PhD, there was no grant money available for a stipend, so I needed to find a summer job to pay the rent. I had learned some programming skills in graduate school, so I looked for a programming job for the summer. I landed a job at a small high powered contract development and consulting firm in Cambridge, MA started up by some recent MIT graduates. This was 1978, and a PhD candidate in Psychology could easily get a job as a programmer.

At summer’s end, I liked it so much I decided to stay on. I got permission from Tufts to work full time while finishing my doctorate, which at that point, was mostly just completing my thesis. I worked for almost 4 years as a software developer and IT management consultant till I finished my PhD.

Then I took a job as probably one of the very earliest software usability professionals, at Honeywell Information Systems. That was in 1981. I was at the right place at the right time with the right set of dual backgrounds: software development and cognitive psychology. The field of software usability was just emerging.

I worked at Honeywell for a couple of years, then at Wang Laboratories a couple of years, and then went back to academia. I got a position as an assistant professor in the College of Computer Science at Northeastern University in Boston, where I spent a couple of years teaching usability courses to both undergrads and grad students. In 1986 I launched my consulting business, probably one of the first full time independent consultancies in software usability in the nation. I have been an independent consultant ever since, now in my 24th year.

3. What is it about usability that you most enjoy, or find most rewarding?

Although I have been working in the software industry since 1978, I still mainly consider myself a cognitive psychologist. I love learning and thinking about how the human mind works in the intellectual, information processing sense. In particular, human learning, memory, creativity and problem solving, as well as the more recent connections of those phenomenon to brain science, fascinate me. I enjoy the problem of applying what we know about cognition to the design of software user interfaces.

I enjoy all aspects of usability engineering – I like doing the research to understand different kinds of work people do and how they think about it and organize it. I really love doing user interface design. I also love applying what I learned about the scientific method in grad school to designing usability tests that will yield valid and useful results, and provide insight into how people approach software.

In addition, I love being a consultant because of the opportunity it provides to sample a lot of different industries, hardware/software platforms, application types and user types. The variety keeps it fresh for me.

I also love being independent. The only job as an employee I ever enjoyed was my first one as a programmer for a small firm of 50 people. Large corporations and academia were very frustrating work environments for me. Relative freedom from organizational politics and control of my lifestyle are very important to me. I live in a very rural area in a community I have been a part of since I was born, which is a lifestyle I love. Being independent means I can live where I want and how I want. The internet has meant I need to travel less and less to work with my clients, who are all over the nation and the world.

4. Your early research with usability and user-centered design methods (for example, “The Usability Engineering Lifecycle” from 1999) has been standard reading for anyone interested in an education in usability, how did you come up with this approach, what were your inspirations?

It’s a little hard to remember!

Certainly all my methodology was built on the work of others. I taught my first tutorial at CHI in 1986 (the very first CHI conference was in 1983), and the basic framework of my Usability Engineering Lifecycle was already there.

I think my main contribution with the 1999 book was synthesizing a lot of well established individual techniques into a lifecycle process. There is very little that is original in the techniques I describe in that book – what is unique is how they are all pulled together in a logical sequence where each one feeds into the next, as well as the templates, examples and war stories I included.

I never planned to write a book. I was teaching at Northeastern University in 1985 when a recruiter for Prentice-Hall came around my department hoping to talk professors into signing contracts to write text books. They put the idea in my head, and I started writing my first book, Principles and Guidelines for Software User Interface Design, which they published in 1992. I had originally planned for a single book to include both principles and methods, but the principles half got so big I decided to defer the methods for another book, which I then published in 1999.

As for the “Cost Justifying Usability” books, I had an “aha!” moment after reading an early article on the topic by Marilyn Mantei, then gave a talk at a conference on the topic. Randolph Bias attended that talk, and then decided the time was ripe for a book on this topic and contacted me to collaborate.

5. In 2001, you had argued that Discount User Experience methods would not sufficiently reduce project risk and insure Return On Investment. You had further stated that paying for Spot usability checks by “Gurus” would not either. In today’s environment, with AGILE software development processes, do you still hold to that belief, why or why not?

That is a very interesting question!

Yes, I do still hold that belief, perhaps even more so.

I view an application user interface as a coherent, unified system, that cannot be effectively designed piecemeal. Its like an automobile, a huge bridge, the human body, or any other complex system – all the parts have to work together in an integrated, smooth way. Thus, any approach that does not consider the whole is not going to be very effective.

I cannot look at a few individual functions, screens or pages and give effective advice on how to design them, without understanding the complete set of functionality across the whole application, not to mention a lot of key things about the users, the tasks they are doing, and the environment they are doing them in.

For instance, I cannot recommend using bold or a color as a cue for something like required fields, without knowing all the things that need to be consistently cued across the application and what cues I am going to use for what. Not to mention the fact that there needs to be a coherent information architecture that can only be designed based on an understanding of users’ tasks and the full set of functionality being offered in an application.

So for me, any approach that does not consider the entire application is going to fail to achieve consistency and coherence, the fundamentals of usability, and any approach that does not incorporate detailed information about users, tasks and environment is going to miss opportunities to tailor an interface to those requirements.

I think you truly get what you pay for.

There may be simple little page design issues that can be addressed without the big picture, but they are not going to buy you all that much. The most bang for the buck comes with higher level issues of information architecture and conceptual model design. So, the briefer and shallower the analysis, the higher the risk of missing key usability issues and opportunities.

As for Agile, I think there is an inherent conflict between that approach and sound usability engineering. I advocate a top down approach to UI design, that starts with the information architecture (in turn premised on an understanding of the full set of intended functionality and user tasks), and then a conceptual model design which is a set of standards for the visual presentation of and interaction with the IA, followed last by page detail design standards. That is, big picture established first, details to follow.

While I am not a student of the Agile method and have not actually practiced it (so far I have not worked with a client who has adopted it), I learned a little about it while consulting with a firm building software tools to support the Agile methodology.

While there is much about the Agile approach that is attractive (lots of iterations, feedback from the customer throughout, discovery of requirements as you go along via concrete prototypes), I think there is only so far you can get by putting a system together piecemeal, without considering the overall framework.

I wonder about the Agile approach because it seems to me that just like UI design, in system architecture design a top down approach is also most efficient and effective. The only way I can imagine the Agile approach working effectively is if a great deal of rework is done along the way as the discovery process evolves.

You cannot build a patchwork UI and have it be usable (or easily maintainable for that matter.) Thus, if you are going to approach it in a piecemeal way, there is a point at which you are going to have to throw out a lot of work and start from the top and design a coherent framework, in order to impose order on chaos.

One could certainly take an approach to UI design that would be compatible with the Agile philosophy and approach – I am just not convinced it will be either effective or efficient.

6. In your book “Cost Justifying Usability” you made the case that you must align your cost justification to the audience. How should a usability practitioner respond if the audience is a CFO, and that CFO expressly desires a “guaranteed” Return On Investment?

Great question!

And one I have thought about a fair amount. I have indeed been asked on occasion, and recently more often, to “guarantee” that my work will improve usability in some measurable way.

At first blush it seems like a perfectly reasonable request – I do after all claim that there can be a dramatic return on investment from expert usability work. However, the question is, how can the impact of usability work accurately be assessed?

Let’s consider an example. Imagine we are consulting on an e-commerce web site. The goal is increased sales, or “conversions.” A client might say to me, how about if you guarantee that your work will increase our conversion rate by at least 1% (which could be cost-justified, given my quote), or we will not pay. There are a number of problems here:

First, unless the client is willing to implement all of my redesign recommendations, exactly as specified, I cannot be held responsible for the results. This may seem reasonable to the client, but for many reasons – some technical, some political – they rarely do this. Who is to say if they have come close enough to implementing my recommendations for me to be held accountable for the results?

In many if not most of my consulting jobs, the client only takes some of my recommendations, or implements them in a somewhat different way than I specified. If this is the case, I cannot take responsibility for the results.

Second, many things impact conversion rates other than usability. For example, suppose a client took and completely implemented all my recommendations exactly . . . . just prior to the dot-com bust, or just prior to the recent recession? Who is to say whether it is the economy or my design that has impacted conversions?

Third, such a guarantee can work against my client too. What if they implement technical improvements which make their website work better on more browsers, or the economy picks up, at the same time they also implement my recommendations? Even if my recommendations are not responsible, other factors may raise conversion rates, and they would have to pay me regardless of whether I earned it or not.

It is rare that the only thing that changes from one release to another is the UI design. Usually many other things, both internal and external to the web site, change as well. In anything but a well controlled laboratory study, it is very hard to determine the sources of changes in measures of success or failure.

Fourth, if I could take controlled, laboratory-based before and after measures of usability in a project and use those as the measure of my contribution, that might at first blush seem reasonable. But, as we all know, UI design is part science and part art. Few of us could reasonably guarantee an improvement if not afforded the opportunity to iteratively test and redesign.

It’s rare that a client is willing to pay for multiple iterations of redesign and testing, or even before and after measures, so the criteria to determine if the the guarantee has been met or not is simply not cost effective in most cases.

In general, there are just too many other factors in play besides UI design that impact measures of usability. Thus, I don’t think its unreasonable to decline these sorts of requests for guarantees.

Finally, full time usability employees (or employees in any field for that matter) are not asked to guarantee a specific payoff from their work in order to get paid their salary, and I do not see any reason why consultants should either.

Unlike employees, clients simply do not have to rehire us if they are not happy with our work. They generally have to live with poorly performing employees. Consultants survive (or not) by establishing credibility in other ways – word of mouth, references, publishing well regarded books, etc.

What I offer my potential clients instead of guarantees is success stories.

For example, a large government client from a couple of years ago recently contacted me to work on a new release of an intranet I had redesigned for them previously. They had implemented most of my previous recommendations, and told me that the new design had been a big success:

User complaints had dropped from 10% to 0%.
Many more users had adopted the intranet as a work tool.
They had received an internal award for innovation.
Their intranet was now considered an example of best practices in usable design within their agency.
They found they had much more clout in recruiting other internal development projects to adhere to some of their standards.

When you can cite stories like this, and give references from clients who have benefited from your work in these ways, this is good enough to be expected to be paid for your time and expertise.

7. Social Media, with its almost instant communications threshold has seen rampant growth in the past few years. How are the Social web and instant connected communications like Twitter, FaceBook, Instant Messaging and the like changing usability and usability testing, or are they?

I wouldn’t say social media is actually changing usability or usability testing – they are just new types of applications, where all the same old principles and methods of usability still apply.

When the web first came along, people said the same thing, they seemed to think everything we had learned about usability in the context of traditional desktop applications had suddenly gone out the window, and we had to start all over again.

It just was not true.

People have not changed much in the last 50 years (or 50,000 for that matter) and all of the principles of usability are premised on understanding human information processing capabilities and weaknesses. Usability methods are similarly premised on how to measure and interpret human behavior.

While changes in technology do open up new possibilities, or place new constraints on the design of human-computer interaction (eg, limits of handheld mobile devices), most of the design principles and methods are universal and platform-independent.

For example, human memory constraints, and the advantages of consistency, are the same regardless of whether you are designing for a large screen, or a handheld device – you just have to apply the principles to different technological constraints and capabilities. Similarly, testing a design on either type of platform will follow a very similar if not identical methodology.

What I do find interesting about social media in the context of the business world is the opportunity to consider incorporating the concept of social media into corporate software to build community, share corporate knowledge assets more effectively and promote professional networking for the organization’s benefit.

I have just been helping a client consider how to use these new concepts to support their business goals through their intranet, and the possibilities seem to have a lot of potential. There will certainly be usability issues in designing these capabilities and usability testing will be just as important as ever. There is just not a whole lot of new principles to be revealed or methodologies to be devised. The same tried and true usability approaches will work just fine.

By the way, my opinion (and the opinion of many of my peers) is that Facebook has an abysmal user interface. They keep changing it, but apparently not based on any usability science, as it remains flawed, just in different ways with each modification.

Social media applications need usability input, just as any other type of software application.

If someone produced an application with the same functionality and a superior user experience, Facebook would be in trouble, just as IBM was in trouble when the Apple Macintosh came out.

8. In your opinion, what’s next for usability? What should usability practitioners and web site designers be focusing on for the future, say the next 2-3 years?

I think designing good UIs for small mobile/handheld devices is going to be a big area for our field, and applying social media in ways like I just described above as well.

In addition, I think we need to welcome and learn to work effectively with other professions and skillsets required to create a truly optimal User Experience: graphic designers, eCommerce “persuasion” experts, SEO experts, pay-per-click experts, etc.

The most powerful and successful user experiences require all these elements (and probably more), and it’s amazing what we can create working in interdisciplinary teams, that none of us could produce alone.

9. What are your plans for the future? What are you looking forward to doing next in your career?

Well, actually, I am working on a very exciting new project which I cannot talk about yet. Ask me again in about 6 months!

Thank you Dr. Deborah Mayhew!

It’s refreshing to hear that even with all the changes in terms of communications and the near-instant aspect of the new Social Media, the same basics of good usability and user-centered design apply.

For more information about Dr. Deborah Mayhew visit her web site at:

http://drdeb.vineyard.net

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Interview with Usability Leader Daniel Szuc

Today’s interview is with a usability dynamo, Daniel Szuc. Among Dan’s significant contributions to the usability profession are: President and founding member of the Hong Kong branch of the Usability Professional’s Association, Principal Usability Consultant at Apogee Usability, Asia, co-creator of the Usability Kit, user experience author and speaker.

1. What’s your background? Where did you go to school, what subjects interested you?

Dan’s Life – Phase 1. I grew up and studied in Melbourne Australia and finished a Bachelor of Social Science (Information Management) at Melbourne University. This was a new degree at the time aimed at teaching a little about business and a little about technology.

Basically it was for people who did not have “the smarts” to do a either a full on business or computer engineering degree. The idea of the “Information Manager” is that he/she would be the bridge between the IT and the business – the person gathering IT requirements and translating these into business speak. This was the start of my interest in making technology easy to use.

2. How did you get into the usability field?

Dan’s Life – Phase 2. I started working as a Developer at Telstra Australia in a small development team at Telstra Research. I quickly discovered I had no real interest in learning programming and was not great at it. I did like the “front end” and worked as the person on the team who designed screens, created help files, wrote user manuals and walked through screens with the development team. I would also go on site to install software and train end users.

This was the beginnings of what I understood at the time as “Human Factors”. Then one day, while reading a Telstra newsletter, I noticed a job posting in a new Usability team forming to help implement User Centered Design as part of Customer Support systems. I jumped at it!

Dan’s Life – Phase 3. On that team I worked with some real pioneers and clever people in Usability/Design in Australia including Sarah Bloomer, Susan Wolfe, Gerry Gaffney, Shane Morris, Fiona Meighan and Sheryl Lumb (to name a few). People who are still in the UX field today! I was lucky to have such a great learning ground and platform.

3. What is it about usability that you most enjoy, or find most rewarding?

That there will always be design and technology problems to fix and there will always be ways to improve the “human condition.”

4. As Principal Usability Consultant at Apogee Usability Asia, what do you find are the differences, if any, between usability needs in Asian countries vs those of the west, and why?

Dan’s Life – Phase 4. The major difference is that the UX research and design field in Asia is still maturing. It’s really nice to be a part of it. The community is younger and eager to learn but still absorbing what it means to take UX methods and implement these in their own corporate cultures and teams.

There is still so much to learn on what it means to take existing product design approaches and apply them to these markets or alternatively to learn what it takes to research and design for emerging markets. Apogee’s suggestion is highlighted in an article – Don’t wait for permission to conduct your own research.

Everyone (time and monies allowing) should leave the comfort of their home city, community, friends/family and country and simply travel. Watch, listen and learn. We enjoy watching people who visit us and who may have never been to Hong Kong or mainland China before. I have lived in Hong Kong for 10 years and still have so much to learn, as I mentioned in an article, it is a constant cycle of self improvement.

5. You produced the Usability Kit in partnership with Gerry Gaffney. Why did you develop this tool kit and how do you picture it helping people that use it?

The Usability Kit was intended to be a quick and practical tool kit for people who want to do “do it yourself UX.”

So what does it take to Design with the business and users in mind? How do we know if what we design will succeed in the market? How do we think about compelling User Experiences in the first place? How do we ensure we are constantly improving our designs going forward? The kit provides end to end UX tools you can use in your projects to ensure that Usability (and User Centered Design thinking) is being implemented towards making successful products and services.

This includes everything from understanding UX, to research (understanding your customers), to design (designing with and for your customers and business stakeholders) to evaluation (seeing if what you designed actually works well for your customers) and getting constant feedback along the way. Me and Gerry are big fans of “do it yourself UX” where you don’t protect your UX knowledge, rather you teach it to as many people as possible so UX gets baked into organizational cultures.

I also talk more about this and how to sell usability together with Paul Sherman and John Rhodes, who also recently published a book on the same topic called “Selling Usability – User Experience Infiltration Tactics.“

6. In addition to all your other activities, you are President and founding member of the UPA China Hong Kong branch, what do you find is so rewarding about your involvement with the UPA in general, and the Hong Kong branch in particular?

The people and the UX profession. Whether you lead with Usability, Design, IA, UX, Research (or pick your own), most people you meet in our profession are deeply passionate about improving products to help people.

It’s also fun to be exposed to different UX markets through my travels over the years. To talk about shared pain and to also look at how UX could be better positioned. I hope to be able to contribute in small and big ways for many years to come and with this nurture new leadership. As we get older and as technology usage changes, it’s important to keep connected with a younger generation of users.

7. You’ve been spending some time in seminars and on blogs regarding accessing a company’s readiness to embrace UX, why do you believe this is an important topic, and what do you believe is critical to this assessment?

Yes, and I talk about selling usability in more detail in a recent article I wrote at UXMatters. I’ll also be writing about it in Johnny Holland Magazine, as precursor to the UX Australia Conference.

It’s important because we don’t always do a great job at marketing what we do. We use our own jargon… All the time! Usability, UCD, IXD, IA. It’s not surprising that the people who buy our services don’t know what they are buying.

We should be working on a “shared language” or a “common vocabulary” towards helping ourselves sell what we do more effectively and in the process help our clients reach product success.

We all have to sell to or work with different organizations and cultures that all have different levels of receptiveness to our message. Some organizations are more ripe to the UX message than others. There are “cultural patterns” that indicate healthy interest in UX and show that people are buying into UX including (to name a few:

• Management is using the lingo – terms like User Experience or Customer Experience are being used in presentations
• Hired a Director or VP of UX – this does not always promise UX success because it depends on how savvy that person is in promoting their team services. But it at least shows some organisational commitment to what we do
• Usability testing of products is a given – some process is in place for critiquing products and services with customers. There is a constant flow of customer feedback being embraced and fed back into Product Development
• Money is flowing to bring in new UX’ers – budget has been allocated to grow UX in the organisation. The UX army is growing.
• Product managers claim that UX is strategic advantage – some form of UX involvement has helped them improve their products, make more sales and make them look good.

8. What are your plans for the future? What are you looking forward to doing next in your career?

First, I’m attending the UPA conference. Longer term –

Dans Life – Phase 5 – More travel, more happiness, more fun and good health of course

I hope to learn more on what it takes to make people and products more successful.

This is an important juncture for everybody on the planet. We are continuing to make products that people don’t need. We are also not doing a great job of understanding what people’s needs are in the first place (because we don’t ask) or we don’t make them part of our design process.

The continued development of stuff we don’t need or use costs us millions of dollars and we are creating more and more stuff that either cannot be sold or that gets thrown out, creating more and more waste. This does not help us become more sustainable, and this is really the time we need to start thinking about what and how we build new stuff.

Thanks for inviting me to this interview!

And my thanks to Dan Szuc for taking the time to provide his thoughts about usability!

Daniel Szuc:

Apogee
Dan Szuc at Flickr
Dan Szuc on Twitter

Daniel Szuc’s Recommended List of Usability Reading:

1. Design is the Problem
2. The 3 Steps for Creating an Experience Vision
3. Is Your Company Designed for Humans?
4. It’s All Happening in China – A Report from User Friendly 2004
5. Usability in Hong Kong
6. UX India: Where have we come from and where do we need to go?
7. Daniel Szuc on UX in China
8. Best Careers 2009: Usability Experience Specialist
9. 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design

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• Interview with Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D., Author of "Neuro Web Design"
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Interview with Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D., author of “Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?” and Chief of Technical Staff at Human Factors International

Today’s interview is with a person who has been pushing the realm of usability into the unconscious, so to speak.

Susan Weinschenk’s research and book on how the unconscious mind works in decision making processes, and how that impacts web site interactions is important information for any web developer. Why?

Because by understanding the principles impacting unconscious decisions, a web developer can create a web site or application that supports these unconscious decision-making processes, which ultimately makes for a better, more streamlined experience.

1. What is your background? Where did you go to school and what did you study?

I have a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Penn State. I started at Virginia Tech (2 years) then moved to Boston and worked during the day as a secretary and finished my bachelors in psychology at night from Northeastern University. After that was Masters and Ph.D. at Penn State. I specialized in the brain even back then… did my Ph.D. research on the left and right hemispheres.

2. How did you first get involved in usability?

In grad school I took my first computer programming course. This was way way back… before there were PCs… even before there were screens! I ran my first program using cards as input and out came a piece of paper that said, “Job Aborted.” Right then I knew that ordinary people would not be able to use computers that were this socially inept!

I began to study psychology applied to technology design. I didn’t realize that it was an actual field (human factors) until several years later when I accidentally found out about a consulting firm that was doing usability work (the word usability wasn’t really being used back then, it was called “human factors”).

Since then I’ve critiqued, designed and re-designed: many “legacy” character based applications (we didn’t call them legacy back then — they were state of the art!), many GUI applications, web applications, web sites, printer interfaces, screens on copy machines, medical devices, and even a washing machine and a microwave.

3. What is it about usability that you most like, or find rewarding?

I’m a psychologist at heart. I love thinking about, researching and designing for humans, wondering; “how will people react to this?” It’s rewarding to research users and the tasks they are trying to do and then design an interface that really works for them.

4. As Chief of Technical Staff for Human Factors International, how do you use your skills in psychology and neuro web design to make a difference for the company and your clients?

I try to keep up on the latest information in the field and transmit that to my staff who are out there working very hard every day designing for clients.

And I also do speaking and writing on Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust (PET) and my book Neuro Web Design, in order to raise the awareness level of how the new insights and research on unconscious mental processing can be applied to design more persuasive web sites.

5. Should students interested in a usability career consider a degree in psychology, why or why not?

Well, I’m a little biased! For me the basic premise behind usability is what makes people tick… and knowing about people helps immensely in doing the work.

But people come to usability from many backgrounds and they can all be successful. If you don’t have a psychology background I do think it helps to read up on the foundational research that underlies the usability principles we implement.

6. In your book “Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?” you discuss the unconscious and how it influences decisions. Why should web designers understand and use this information?

The latest research in psychology is showing us most mental processing of information occurs unconsciously. So if you want to understand what will make users make a decision or take an action you have to know about unconscious decision making.

For example, customer ratings at a web site are very powerful because they are an example of the principle of social validation. Research in social validation shows that in times of uncertainty we look to others to decide what to do. This is why customer ratings at a web site are so powerful.

And if you combine those ratings with “mini-personas”, like ebags does, where each customer gives a brief description of who they are and how they used the product (“Kathy Jones, 37, frequent business traveler) then you are combining the principle of similarity (we listen to people we think are like us) with social validation. Then the customer reviews are even more influential.

So if you understand these principles of unconscious mental processing you can build more persuasive web pages.

7. Social media usage across the world is exploding, how does neuro web design influence social media?

People are social animals. They will always take whatever the latest technology is and figure out how to make it social. Social media is intertwined with many of the principles in Neuro Web Design.

Take for example, reciprocity. Most social media makes use of the fact that if you do something for me (follow me on twitter, “poke” me on facebook) then I will feel a drive to do something similar to/for you.

8. What’s coming up next for you? What are you looking forward to working on?

What a great question. I don’t think anyone has asked me this in any of the interviews I’ve been doing… Let’s see… I’d like to write some more books, and, as always keep reading the research. Anyone have any ideas on what my next book should be?

Thank you Susan!

The study of Persuasion, Emotion and Trust and how web sites can use PET in designing a better experience has taken off in the past year or so. And when it comes to persuasion and Neuro web design, Susan Weinschenk wrote the book, literally!

Susan’s book; “Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?” is available now at Amazon or your favorite bookseller.

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One in a series of interviews with people who make a difference in the usability field

One of the more enjoyable aspects of the usability field is having a chance to speak with and learn from people. After all, our ultimate goal is to make things easier for people, right? But it seems that in this electronic age speaking with and learning from people happens sometimes a bit less than it should.

So, I’ve decided to interview people who I believe have made a difference for those of us in the usability field. Many are usability practitioners, some not. But in my opinion all have gone above and beyond and have helped advance the usability field.

Today’s interview is with Paul Sherman, a former Usability Professionals’ Association President and Founder and Principal Owner of ShermanUX, a user experience consultancy.

1. What is your background? Where did you go to school and what subjects interested you?

I was trained as a human factors psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, where I earned my PhD in 1997.

My dissertation research focused on how pilots’ use of computers and automated systems on the flight deck affects their individual and team performance. During this work, I logged about 145 legs on the flight decks of commercial transport aircraft, mostly large passenger jets.

2. How did you first get involved in usability?

I first got involved in the user experience field when I found during my doctoral program that commercial pilots often struggled to understand and learn how to use the “flight management computer” on the newest, most highly automated jets. It was my first experience actually seeing and recognizing a real-world mismatch between designers’ and end users’ mental models.

3. What is it about usability that you most like, or find rewarding?

I absolutely love the fact that as user experience practitioners we are able to tackle business problems and make a significant contribution to an organization’s success. And the fact that we’re reducing frustration and – if we’re very good at what we do – generating delight is a huge bonus.

I really can’t imagine enjoying another career as much as I enjoy this one. Except for maybe rock star. But since that’s stopped paying well and I’m married, I’m thinking that UX now ranks higher than rock star.

4. You have served in several major roles for the Usability Professional’s Association, including being a past president. What did you find so compelling about your service with the Association?

Having the chance to help guide one of the major professional associations in the UX world has been a real learning experience.

It’s compelling because it has allowed me to develop my abilities to think strategically and to work through others rather than doing all the work myself. And it’s given me perspective on just how hard it is to drive organizational change, even with a relatively small leadership team like UPA’s.

The final piece of the puzzle for me has been being able to interact with other practitioners and learn more about how others approach the tasks that comprise our work.

5. In a recentUXMatters article, you discussed the importance of including the user experience as part of the enterprise software selection process. Why do you believe it is important to get this message out?

I think it’s important because, well, the enterprise software user experience typically ranges from abysmal to barely tolerable. It just doesn’t have to be this way! We can do better! OK, stepping off the soapbox now…

6. What is the single most important thing about practicing usability in an enterprise?

I think there’s actually two important things, both are necessary for success but neither alone is sufficient:

1. Clearly define what you’re trying to accomplish, both for each product release and for the organization as a whole. Without long-term goals, you’re just a service organization-slash-cost center.

2. Get buy-in from highly placed allies who are “true believers” in the value of usability and user experience. You will need these people to stand up for your team during budgetary skirmishes.

7. What is the biggest “gotcha” or problem of enterprise software usability?

The biggest gotcha in my opinion is workflow. That is, it’s difficult to shoehorn every customers’ particular set of processes into the workflow determined by the software product, and it’s not always advisable to make the product’s workflow extremely configurable. Therein lies the rub.

8. What are your plans for the near future, what’s coming up next?

Over the past two years I have found myself doing more interaction design and contextual/field research to inform designs. I’m happy to have the opportunity to develop these skills and serve clients in this role. And it pays the bills quite well, which my gadget happy daughters are no doubt happy about.

Lately, I’ve been focused on developing a solid offering in the area of helping organizations plan, hire for, and execute on strategic user experience initiatives. Since I’ve built UX teams at several organizations, I feel it’s something I do well and can help others do.

The challenge is to define this offering in a way that makes it compelling to organizations. I think many organizations now “get” the value of tactical usability and interaction design, but are only now just starting to realize what it takes to maintain a long-term focus on their products’ and services’ user experiences. It takes commitment, focus, and regular measurement and assessment.

Thank you Paul!

I’d like to thank Paul Sherman for taking the time out of his busy schedule to answer these questions, and provide us with a bit more insight into the user experience.

I hope you find this interview helpful and interesting. If you would like me to interview others in the usability field that you believe have made a difference please do add a comment below.

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