When Institutionalizing usability, it’s critical that 5 user-centered design principles be developed and adhered to.
I was recently reading HFI’s white paper on Digital User Experience Strategies, and I came across an interesting sidebar that captured my attention. In this sidebar the Author, Jarome Nadel, discusses the 5 critical user-centered design principles an Enterprise must have in order to facilitate a digital user experience strategy.
I found the side note interesting, because I believe it accurately and simply explains what it takes to have an Enterprise-wide user-centered design methodology. Take away any of these 5 principles, and institutionalizing usability will not happen.
Here then are the 5 user-centered design principles mentioned in the sidebar, and my comments about each:
1. Executive Support for Usability:
Simply put, an executive champion is critical to institutionalizing user-centered design. Anyone who’s worked in a large company can tell you horror stories about “silos.” Each silo (aka business unit) owner must make decisions that either improves the unit’s revenue, or decreases expenses.
For example, many years ago (pre-Twitter or WordPress if you can believe that!) when I worked at a very large health care company here in the U.S., the Senior Vice President of Individual insurance had vastly different goals than the SVP of Large Group, or of Senior. Their ultimate goals were the same, 15% increase in profit, but their methods for achieving their goals were vastly different.
Because of this, institutionalizing a single overarching set of resources and standards, to promote a unified strategy for user-centered design, could not happen. A project that was mission-critical to Individual, say for example an easy to use online health insurance quote form, was not at all needed or necessary for Large Group, which for example might have needed an easy to use group administrator dashboard.
Without executive support to bring resources and standards to help each unit, based on a set of overarching user-centered design standards and a unified design strategy, the units were left to themselves and could make design decisions in a vacuum, sans Enterprise design strategy and standards.
For that company, this silo strategy was the preferred method of operation and worked well, as witnessed by years of steady business growth. However not all companies can use such a philosophy, and it should be noted that in this new Customer-empowered web 2.0 world chinks will show in the armor. Say for example customers transition from one supporting business unit to another, or wish to use the same applications no matter how they contact the company (phone, web, cell-phone, etc).
With more and more empowered digital customers connecting to an enterprise using multiple channels, and expecting a single and unified customer experience, the Enterprise strategy for user-centered design and standards becomes ever more important, as does the need for a executive champion.
2. User-Centered Design Process
The process the Enterprise sets in place to achieve a comprehensive user-centered design methodology is critical.
This user-centered process includes;
- Creation and maintenance of all digital assets
- Development and adjustment of an overall user-centered design strategy
- Conducting on-going primary and secondary research into customer Personas and needs
- Mandating usability testing throughout the development process, at key points along the way
- Validating designs post launch, with a master set of customer experience and usability metrics that track performance over time.
- Feedback loops to provide key learnings back into the business and technology units (I added this one. Remember that old feedback arrow from that ancient Dinosaur “Continuous Quality Improvement?” It still works!).
3. Standardization
As is so well put by the white paper:
“When business units run their digital operations in the same way, usability variances are essentially eliminated and efficiencies are optimized.”
I’m reminded of a funny story. Again, at that large health insurance company a long time ago, we invited Dr. Eric Schaffer (of Human Factors International, Inc. fame) to provide an executive consultation to senior executives regarding the best way to develop a corporate eCommerce design strategy. Eric was discussing standards, when one of the executives raised their hand and asked,
“So, how many standards should there be? Should we have one standard for internal-facing applications and a separate set of standards for external-facing applications?”
Eric stopped, gathered his thoughts for a few seconds and then said in a quiet voice,
“Well, if you have multiple standards, then you really don’t have a Standard, do you?”
The room was dead quiet for several heartbeats as the pure and simple logic of this statement drilled into everyone around the big table. The meeting continued, but the point was brilliantly driven home. A single set of design standards is one of the easiest ways for an enterprise to ensure a good and consistent user experience, while reducing the expense of design and development teams “re-creating the wheel.”
4. Usability Maturity
Usability can actually be a competitive advantage for a company. All else being equal, an enterprise that has a fully mature usability set of standards and design principles will be producing applications more efficiently, and more effectively.
The improved customer satisfaction received over time by these more usable applications will begin to help move that enterprise above competitors who approach design and development with ad-hoc, or worse, cross-purpose user-centered designs.
Usability becomes the lever that moves the usability-mature enterprise above all competition, and keeps it there. The rest have to play catch-up.
5. Usability Metrics and Modeling
One of the top 12 useful usability books I recommended was “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day.” Why? Because it’s the smart usability practitioner that constantly analyzes metrics coming from web sites or applications. This provides three benefits:
First – Analyzing metrics helps determine the usability “health” of the web site or application. Sudden changes in metrics will call out a potential problem that has occurred. Knowing the best and worst performing pages or tasks will also help prioritize where usability resources should be applied.
Second – The rest of the enterprise speaks metrics. By speaking the language of the rest of the enterprise, the smart usability practitioner is actively involved in business discussions, and can proactively contribute to discussions of how to improve results, by applying usability.
Third – The usability and related user experience metrics will over time provide enough data with which to conduct modeling. Keeping a storehouse of knowledge, learnings and best practices will also prove useful as potential new designs are applied in models. The point is to leverage the massive amounts of usability and related metrics to help build smarter design processes and create efficiencies over time.
The 5 enterprise user-centered design principles
I believe that there’s a lot of information in that one little side bar in the HFI white paper! I think the enterprise that incorporates all 5 user-centered design principles has much better chance of being the enterprise that rises above the competition.
As more and more people move into the web 2.0 world, and use their individual voices to communicate with an enterprise in multiple channels, it becomes more and more critical for an enterprise to offer a consistent and satisfying user experience across all touch-points.
You can download and read the free HFI white-paper: “Digital User Experience Strategy: A roadmap for the post-web 2.0 world“
Dr. Eric Schaffer’s book about institutionalizing usability: “Institutionalization of Usability: A Step-by-Step Guide“
User Centered Design Has Been Around Longer Than You May Think! Case in Point; Irving Thalberg and Previewing the Movies of the 1920s and 30s.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that user centered design is not just a recent practice associated with building web sites or designing mobile devices such as cell phones or iPods. In fact, user centered design has been around for a long time, in many industries, although it may not have always had the title we give it today.
Irving Thalberg and User Centered Design
One example of user centered design is Irving Thalberg and the popular and successful movies he produced and previewed with target audiences in the 1920s and 1930s.
Irving Thalberg was referred to as the “boy wonder” of Hollywood, and his story is the stuff movies are made about.
Thalberg was born on 30th of May, 1899 in New York City and had health issues all his life, especially a bad heart due to a bout with rheumatic fever he contracted during his teen years. His bad heart and poor health due to overworking would eventually lead to his death at the early age of only 37.
Thalberg was especially intelligent and drove himself hard, skipping going to University after graduating from High School and instead going to work for the largest movie production company of that time, Universal. Thalberg quickly established himself in the upper echelon of Universal, but after a short stint there left to go to a smaller upstart company, Louis B Mayer Productions, partly because of a failed romance with the daughter of Universal’s head, Carl Laemmle.
Thalberg began producing successful movies for Louis B Mayer and soon benefited from the acquisition of Louis B. Mayer Productions by the highly successful theater owner, Marcus Loew. Loew had recently merged Metro Productions with Goldwyn Pictures and needed expert producers to help bring in out-of-control and poorly run movie productions. Thalberg and Mayer would quickly take the new MGM to the pinnacle of Hollywood studios, and make MGM the largest and most successful studio for decades.
User Centered Design: Movie Previews
In many ways Thalberg can be credited for creating the modern movie studio system and many successful production practices still used today. Included in this was Thalberg’s commitment to previewing movies with real audiences prior to releasing the movie to the general public. Previewing a movie with a target audience is an example of user centered design, a practice by the way which is still used today for movies and TV shows.
Thalberg’s use of user centered design worked well, most of his movies were popular with audiences, and the vast majority brought in bountiful profits for MGM. Thalberg used these previews to determine if additional editing or changes were necessary to improve the movie, prior to it’s final release. Thalberg’ genius can even be said to have extended beyond the obvious audience experience, he was apparently able to read the audience’s non-verbal reactions to scenes of a film and instinctively knew what to add or change to make the audience’s reaction for those scenes even better.
One example of Thalberg using this non-verbal user feedback to improve the experience was the changes he made after previewing the movie “The Big Parade” as mentioned at the Internet Movie Database:
Thalberg took the rough cut and previewed it before live audiences in Colorado. Although the audiences responded favorably, Thalberg decided to expand the scope of the picture as Vidor had created a war picture without many scenes of war. He had Vidor restage the famous marching Army column sequence with 3,000 extras, 200 trucks and 100 airplanes, adding about $45,000 to the negative cost of the film. After Vidor moved on to another project, Thalberg had other battle scenes shot by director George Hill. The result was a classic, a major hit that proved to be M.G.M.’s most profitable silent picture. “The Big Parade” was an example of Thalberg’s perfectionism as a managing producer.
Sadly, with Thalberg’s success came jealousy and greed. Louis B Mayer became unhappy with the Boy Wonder, especially after Thalberg received a bigger stock compensation reward than Mayer did. With failing health, Thalberg took time off from work and went to Europe with his wife. Mayer used Thalberg’s absence as an opportunity to bring in other Producers, and eliminated Thalberg’s role as the sole Producer of MGM. Thalberg continued producing movies in his more diminished role at MGM, but eventually overworked himself again and caught pneumonia, which resulted in his untimely death.
User Centered Design in Movie Production Today
Thalberg’s legacy lives on today, including the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial award given to a distinguished Producer at the Academy Awards every year, and of course the continuing practice of user centered design with previews of new movies. I actually attended several movie and TV show previews, the one that most readily comes to mind being a preview for the movie The Abyss. I distinctly recall the fairly lengthy multi-page survey each audience member had to complete after viewing the movie, including questions about how much I liked or disliked each of the major characters, scenes I like best, or worst, and overall satisfaction with the movie, along with many others. It’s interesting to think that a user centered design practice established during the beginning of the golden age of the Studio system is alive and well and still being used today.
For more about Irving Thalberg:
WikiPedia Irving Thalberg article
The Mediadrome Thalberg Biography
The Internet Movie Database Irving Thalberg Biography
Have you seen Google’s new open source browser, Chrome? As with all things Googlish, the fine Googlers have released a beta version of a new browser that is supposed to simplify and eliminate annoying extras (chrome) that come with other browsers to provide users with a better experience.
Google (being the speed freaks they are) also tell us that Chrome is faster than other browsers, which should be helpful from a usability standpoint. And being good Netizens they’ve made the whole thing open source so that any developers anywhere can play with it to introduce all sorts of cool add-ons and such.
Finally, Chrome introduces some pretty significant changes in browser features, including tabs that can be grabbed and moved, either inside the existing Chrome browser, or off of the current browser entirely to make a whole new browser. Another new feature is the single search and Address bar, which they call the Omnibox. Pretty cool hunh? Or might it be confusing, if you’re one of the old fashioned set that looks for a bar called “Search” to type things into.
The Usability of Chrome:
So I downloaded and tried out Chrome, and I was fairly impressed with some of the new features, it certainly is a different user experience versus some other browsers. I’m curious however what types of usability testing went into it to get it to this point. Google says Chrome has been in the works for 2 years, so I’m fairly certain that there must have been several iterations along the way, perhaps stimulated from user response.
How Would You Usability Test Chrome?
So my question to you is, if you had to put together a usability test of Chrome, to evaluate how well it works for users and how it stacks up against the competition in performance, what would you do? Since the address and search boxes are now combined, would you test functions such as searching for specific keywords or keyterms along with typical browser functions? Would you time how long it takes to find a specific web page? Would you evaluate the ease-of-use and performance of some of the key functions of the new browser? And what about accessibility issues, such as changing fonts?
Usability Testing Combined Applications:
It’s interesting to consider how a usability test of two what used to be separate functions (in this case the search box and the address box) can be performed in one test. The evaluation method used and the success or failure of the tasks being conducted are probably similar in this case, but that may not always be the case. Since the same box now will be used to conduct two different tasks, the real question may be; does this cause the user initial confusion, enough that it disrupts the user experience, or is it so obvious and self-evident that any initial confusion is easily overcome with usage?
Will Chrome Tarnish With Usage?
It will be interesting to watch the usage statistics for Chrome, to see if the penetration rate increases quickly, or not. Besides the ease of use and speed Chrome brings to the user, there are other issues to consider, including availability of plug-ins and add-ons to make the user experience equal to other browsers. Let’s look again at Chrome in the near future to see whether it will continue to shine, or potentially become a good idea that never quite took off.
So what do you think? Will Chrome succeed and become the next major competitor to IE and Firefox?
