The jujutsu of introducing usability to an organization

Organizational Readiness
mark maxted
Senior Principal Engineer
Blue Coat Systems
Tactics for Success

Motivations
Why do usability initiatives so often meet with only qualified success?
Why did a technique I used with great success at one company fail miserably at the next?
Why am I so frustrated?

Dimensions of Readiness
Technical
Process
Cultural
Product/Market

Technical Readiness
How flexible is the underlying architecture?
How often do you hear “we'd have to change our architecture” in an engineering response?
Can you easily change data presentations?
Is business logic separated from the workflow?
How many interfaces do you have to support?
How agile is your interface toolkit?
Low: business logic and presentation intertwined and hard coded.
High: well layered, “evolvable” UI technology

Architectural Readiness concrete user interfaces abstract interface virtual machine features and services platform platform independence application/ business logic

Process Readiness
Are corporate processes (and the process to change them) well defined ?
Do they incorporate usability?
What is the process for generating product requirements?
Who owns the lexicon?
Are processes for UI and underlying technologies distinct?
Low: ad hoc processes, requirements expressed as features, individual engineers dictate terminology
High: requirements expressed as use stories

Cultural Readiness
Technophilia vs Interdisciplinary Respect
We don't know what we don't know
People who don't know this aren't ready
Use ad hoc demonstrations
Do QA and Customer Service have a say in requirements? What role does Docs play?
Low: engineering claims “we know our users”
Medium: usability is about panel design
High: focus is on end to end customer experience

Product/Market Readiness
Emerging technologies and markets are feature driven
Audiences are poorly defined
Management reacts to early adopters
Mature technologies are solution driven
Audiences are better defined
Management can turn down “distractions”

Tactical Summary
Do's
assess your organization's readiness
recognize inertia
have realistic expectations
be patient and adaptable
develop a roadmap
exploit opportunities to fund your roadmap
Don'ts
act too far ahead of your organization's readiness
try to change too many things at once
spread yourself too thin.

The jujutsu of introducing usability to an organization

by Robert Barlow-Busch on Jul 10, 2007

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