CHI2003: Suggested Solution to the Benchmarking Exercise

In last week's article: Benchmark Yourself Against the Experts UN gave you the chance to see how you did in discussing a business case scenario. If you still want to assess yourself, click through to that story and do not read any further yet. If you want to see what the experts were giving out as answers, keep reading...

It's worth saying again here that, although this business case is inspired by a number of real-world cases, many details have been altered so any similarity to real companies, people and events is purely coincidental.

Suggestions regarding Mary's seminar:
1. Invite influential and respected members of the target audience to comment on and influence the seminar program during the planning phase. Advertise discreetly that you have involved your users in the seminar planning.
2. Conduct the Buffalo seminars in Buffalo unless there are other reasons to fly the Buffalo staff to Boston. For busy development team members there is a considerable difference between a full day seminar and a full day seminar plus several hours of travel time. People might consider it arrogant that 20 people have to travel from Buffalo to Boston to save 1 or 2 people the trouble of traveling in the opposite direction.
3. Let Mary lead the seminar. Letting an outside student run the seminar without Mary in attendance might be interpreted as lack of respect for the audience. Use the seminar to build personal trust.
4. Use MassLink cases, preferably well-documented usability success stories, to sell usability at the seminar in addition to the examples from Don Norman's book.
5. If you do not have any well-documented usability success stories, consider postponing the seminar until you have some.
6. Invite respected project managers or developers to report their own usability success stories at the seminar in 30-40 minute presentations.
7. Include a think-aloud usability test of a company product in the seminar. Obtain the necessary advance permissions from the people who have developed the product. Consider a competitive test of a MassLink product and the corresponding MaineLink product. Stress that you're testing the product, not the people who built it.
8. Run a pilot seminar. Invite a few trusted members of the target group to participate. Invite an experienced external usability consultant and an expert instructor to comment on the professional and educational aspects of the seminar.
9. Make the seminar voluntary. Sell it to the target audience, for instance by conducting public think-aloud tests. Ask Sheila and Gus to attend the first seminar; if they do then discreetly advertise the fact.
10. Consider carefully how you will prove to Sheila and Gus that the seminar was a success. If necessary, change the seminar to make the success simpler to measure. Suggested measurable criteria:
- Number of people who attend voluntarily
- Response to key evaluation questions like 'Was this seminar worth your time?', 'Would you recommend this seminar to a colleague?'
- Consulting requests from new internal clients.
11. Make a follow-up plan. Which usability products will you promote at the seminar? What kind of services do you want to sell to interested and motivated project teams?
12. Invite articulate members of MassLink's support staff to attend each seminar. Support staffers can explain how customers view MassLink's products and services, either as seminar attendees or as speakers. Their first-hand experience is more convincing than Mary's opinions.

Suggestions for Mary's situation more generally (suggestions listed with the most important ones first):
13. Use usability tests to sell usability. Make it as convenient as possible for project team members to watch the tests. Run tests locally both at MassLink's headquarters and at the Buffalo office. You don't need a lab. Schedule tests at convenient times, for example on Friday afternoons. Signal that it's OK to watch tests for just 15 minutes, hoping, of course, that some project team members will be so fascinated that they stay a little longer.
14. Always involve the project team in a usability test. Ask them to participate in the planning, for example in the preparation of test participant profiles and test tasks. Make it their test, not yours. This will also make it less likely that they will blame the tasks or the users for issues with the design.
15. Invite a few customers to come in and talk with project teams about their experiences with MassLink's products. This can be team-building, since hearing about good things and issues from the customer will be hard for the doubters to argue with. Do it in a positive way and make them feel like a part of the activities, and that their contribution is important.
16. Go to team meetings for all teams. Be around often. Be available. This can help them to think of you as part of the team.
17. Ask Gus why some groups are resistant to usability and what he suggests you should do about it. Propose a meeting with Gus and the MassMail project manager to determine why the usability recommendations were ignored. Listen carefully at this meeting - the project manager might have some reasonable but unpleasant messages for you.
18. Consider comparative usability tests to sell usability. Advertise the tests as for example 'MassLink vs. MaineLink'. Invite everyone. Focus on the points where MaineLink may have a usability advantage. Appeal to the project members' team spirit.
19. Talk to the CEO since you have her ear already. Determine some priorites. Suggest, for example that you get to speak at a company meeting. It will help build credibility if the CEO demonstrates in public that usability is important enough to take 10- 15 minutes out of a company meeting.
20. Focus on the successes from groups that have requested help. Build credibility from the ground up with those groups and work toward the more important project managers and development managers in the company.
21. Get the CEO and VP to pilot the next usability test as participants - they can then relate to their product from a customer point of view.
22. If you need to turn down requests, track these for future personnel and budget planning.

Rolf Molich was joined by co-presenters Ron Perkins of Design Perspectives, Deborah J. Mayhew of Deborah J. Mayhew & Associates, and Kara Pernice Coyne at Nielsen Norman Group in a CHI panel at which this exercise was first used.

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