Choose the Propitious Starting Place to bring in Usability, Conference urged

At the recent "Hot Topics in Usability" conference, the theme of culture change came up as a key element to getting usability into the design process.

Whitney Quesenbery of Whitney Interactive Design led a discussion on how to embed usability into organisational practices. 'People won't say that they want usability, they'll say "We’ve been told we need to be more customer focussed. Can you help?"’ she told the room.

And conference organiser Caroline Jarrett pointed out that the most propitious place to start might not be the most sensible in production terms. Internal politics frequently determined how best to make inroads and the best starting point would vary from organisation to organisation.

The issue of getting commitment from internal stakeholders clearly affected most people attending the conference and various tactics for convincing the sceptical emerged.

Tom Stewart of System Concepts suggested that it is easier to sell usability to the producers of ecommerce services, where customers can walk away after trying to use it, than to the manufacturers of bought software, whose short-term interest is in selling an untried product.

He also pointed out that the academic tendency to identify problems, 'being happier proving something doesn't work than helping get something right', did not endear the work of some usability professionals to the rest of their company.

Quesenbery concluded that usability experts needed to decide whether their practice was 'an interesting branch of psychology, or a tool for design'. She favoured the latter. Her thoughts echoed those recently expressed at CHI, where guidelines and statistics came under attack for lack of relevance to the business of improving products and services.

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