Workshops

Severely undersized staffs are a chronic problem facing usability professionals. While it's critical for our profession to continue (and improve) its PR efforts to help usability professionals get the resources they need to be effective, it's unlikely that companies will suddenly start expanding the size of any team in the current economic climate.

Improving the efficiency of usability teams is critical to making them more effective, which in turn can help them demonstrate their value to businesses and ultimately help the teams grow. While there are numerous resources available that describe the methods and techniques available to perform usability work, there are few resources available describing how to develop the infrastructure required behind the scenes to perform this work efficiently. The goal of this workshop is to begin documenting best practices for processes and tools that enable usability professionals to work more efficiently and effectively.

Definition of Usability Infrastructure

A usability infrastructure can be defined as a set of strategies, processes, tools, and templates that guide the day-to-day activities of a usability team and ensure that the team is focused on long term strategic goals as well as the tactical needs of its customers.

Building an infrastructure doesn't mean starting from scratch. Our profession and others have developed numerous tools and methods that can form the basis of a usability infrastructure. The trick is enhancing them to suit the unique needs of a usability team.

Strategies

Strategies are often overlooked by usability professionals who are trained more in theory and techniques than they are in strategic thinking. But strategies to gain acceptance of and demand for usability services are critical to growing a team, and should be an integral part of the day-to-day activities of usability professionals. Some of the strategies that will be considered during the workshop include:

Usability Team Branding

Branding is more than coming up with a cool sounding tagline, a neat looking logo, and clean looking templates. The goal of branding a usability team should be to build awareness of the usability team (who they are, what they do), and more importantly, build demand for their services. Examples of usability branding and the politics of branding will be shared at the workshop, and participants will discuss the value of branding in promoting usability.

Promoting the value of the usability team

Especially in the current economic climate, constantly promoting the role and value of a usability team is critical to its continued existence. Many usability professionals are accustomed to promoting usability by giving presentations on user centered design. But effective promotion requires more than just giving PowerPoint presentations and making elevator pitches. Workshop participants will discuss and develop additional team promotion ideas such as:

• Articles in company newsletters
• Email updates about usability team activities and accomplishments
• Presentations at new hire training sessions
• Presence at customer summits, executive off-sites, and other high profile events
• Grand opening celebrations for new usability labs
• Promotional videos
• Posters
• Contests

The role of usability labs in design

Designers of usability labs often focus on matters such as sound proofing, recording equipment, and camera placement. While these elements are important to making a usability lab run efficiently, they aren't enough to ensure the lab is effective in influencing design. Participants will discuss strategies to ensure usability labs create a supportive environment for design innovation, such as:

• Designing observation rooms to support the needs of overworked designers and developers who have little time to spare.
• Encouraging observers to develop suggestions as they watch usability sessions
• Sending special invitations to observe usability studies to customer support and sales groups
• Holding regular brainstorming sessions in the studio to ensure the usability team is focused on major innovations in addition to incremental improvements.

Involvement

One of the toughest decisions for a solo usability practitioner (or anyone in an understaffed usability team) is deciding which battles to fight. A common strategy is to focus on high profile, high importance projects. While this is important to gain support of upper management, it doesn't do much to build relationships with people who aren't on those projects (and who ultimately may have the final say in how your recommendations are implemented).

Workshop participants will discuss how to balance the needs of supporting high visibility, high importance products with the need to build relationships with (and gain the support from) coworkers who need minor feedback on small projects. Although answering their questions may seem trivial compared to working on high priority projects, building relationships with coworkers and demonstrating the rationale user centered design provides for answering design questions is important to building wide-spread support for a usability team.

Process

While it's tempting to work with a project management team to develop a perfect user centered product development process that will be mandated across your organization, it's nearly impossible to get buy-in to a new process that delays development activities so design research can take place. It may be far more effective to start demonstrating user centered design – even if on a few projects – rather than rely on an official process to impose it.

Demonstrating the value of user centered design often begins with usability testing, since that's often the most visible and well known usability activity. Producing useful and professional usability testing feedback is critical to gaining the acceptance needed to expand a usability team's role beyond testing to true user centered design. Workshop participants will discuss processes to make sure usability testing itself is as efficient and effective as possible, giving their teams more time to work on design. These processes may cover topics such as:

• Developing test plans that balance rigor against the need for quick data.
• Usability test recruiting.
• Usability test scripting.
• Conducting the usability test itself.
• Developing efficient processes for handling observers, participants, and VIPs.
• Reporting, presenting, and following up on usability test results.

Tools

Usability Lab

Perhaps the most commonly discussed usability tool is the usability lab itself. While usability labs are not necessary for a successful usability team, a well-designed lab can have a huge impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of a team. Unfortunately (and ironically), many traditional usability labs are horrendously unusable. Workshop participants will be asked to develop guidelines for making usability labs more usable and efficient. Some considerations may include:

• Designing labs for ease of learning and protection against errors like getting videotapes with no sound.
• Capturing as much data as possible in real-time.
• Automating data collection and analysis.
• Eliminating the need to transcribe data from paper to computer.
• Working with usability lab vendors to improve their products.

Templates

Templates may seem relatively unimportant compared to the other infrastructure components discussed above, but there's often considerable time savings possible from creating document templates that take advantage of advanced software features such as bookmarking, variables, and pre-defined menu choices. The workshop will explore examples of templates that help automate test scripts, GOMS analysis, test reports, and other common usability activities.

Summary

Since understaffing of usability teams is a problem likely to plague the usability community for the indefinite future, improving our efficiency and effectiveness is critical to demonstrating our value proposition. Investing in a usability infrastructure enables usability teams to spend less time producing analytical reports and more time doing what's really important – learning from users and bringing that knowledge to key stakeholders.

Details

Participants will be grouped based on the usability environment they work in. Groups may include:

• Usability practitioners flying solo and usability practitioners in consulting firms
• Usability practitioners working in recently established teams that are still developing
• Usability practitioners in well-established usability teams

Throughout the day, each group will meet to discuss and develop best practices for the following components of a usability infrastructure:

• Strategies (What will the usability team focus on first? What are their goals? What strategies will they put into place to achieve them?)
• Processes (How does the usability team operate? How will they promote themselves? How do they work with other groups?)
• Templates (What will the team’s deliverables look like? Will they vary depending on audience? How will the team communicate with the rest of the company?)
• Tools and space (Will the team buy off the shelf tools? Build their own? Will the usability lab have room for design meetings? How will the lab support design activities?) These tools can include things ranging from a library to a portable lab to a full-fledged design center.

After each breakout session, each group will present their findings to the larger group. The larger group will discuss the findings and make additional suggestions to include in the final results.

At the end of the workshop, we'll have a set infrastructure plans, best practices, and examples for usability practitioners in a variety of different settings.

Participant Selection Criteria

We will invite participants who have built usability teams, manage existing teams, or serve as the sole usability practitioner in their company. We particularly welcome participants who have developed unique processes, tools, and other techniques to share with the workshop members.

Participants will be selected to obtain a wide variety of experiences building and/or managing usability teams.

Issue papers will include discussions of:

• The contributor's definition of a usability infrastructure
• Usability culture and maturity in their company (support for usability, challenges facing usability)
• Role of usability team (where involved in design process, deliverables, responsibilities)
• Participants' experiences building a usability team or getting started as the sole usability practitioner
• Discussion of the infrastructure created by (or inherited by) the participant. Specific topics include processes, tools, templates, and strategies supporting usability team activities
• Specific infrastructure artifacts that the participants have found useful in their work
• The problems and promise of various types of infrastructure
• Comments on how participants would change infrastructure if they could start over again

Click here to link to sample position paper.

Applying to Participate in This Workshop

A workshop is a closed session. Admission to a workshop requires an approved position paper from you addressing the issues suggested by the coordinator(s). Please send your position paper (which should be roughly 1 to 3 pages) to James McElroy, upa2004@themcelroys.com . Position papers received by March 24 will be accepted or rejected by March 31, in time for you to register before the early registration deadline on April 2. Position papers received by May 5 will be accepted or rejected by May 12, in time for the May 14 registration discount. Papers received after May 12 will be evaluated at the facilitator's discretion. If you want to register early for UPA and have not completed your position paper by these deadlines, you may register for the rest of the conference and add the workshop fee later.

Pre-workshop participant activities

Potential participants will submit position papers (described above) along with any examples of processes, tools, or templates they can share.

Pre-workshop facilitation activities

The two facilitators will review position papers with an eye toward diversity. As part of the submission we will ask for artifacts that we can collate and use as examples in the workshop. These artifacts will consist of diagrams of infrastructure, templates for recruiting, testing, data analysis, publicity, etc. We will organize the handouts and include our own for this session. We will ask participants to forward any articles related to infrastructure and also to have several “critical incidents” ready for the workshop discussion.

Post-conference dissemination of results

Results will be shared at the conference as a poster session and will be submitted to User Experience within 3 months of the conference. Presenters will also offer to share results at a UPA Boston chapter meeting and as guest speakers in one or more graduate classes in the Bentley Human Factors and Information Design program. We will also post a summary on UTEST and the STC Usability SIG discussion group of the best ideas that emerge.

Post-conference activities

Presenters will create a Yahoo group (if there is interest) to facilitate private post-workshop follow-up discussion between workshop participants.

FACILITATORS

James McElroy
Principal User Experience Engineer
EMC Corporation

James joined EMC Corporation in January 2004 to extend his usability experience to highly complex software products that require extensive domain knowledge.

Prior to joining EMC, James was hired by Monster, the world’s leading career website, to start and manage their usability program. James designed and managed the Monster Usability Studio, a state of the art usability lab. Prior to the creation of the Studio, James managed usability research through the Bentley Design and Usability Testing Center. James worked closely with cross-functional product development teams to translate usability knowledge into products that are effective, efficient, and easy to use.

Before joining Monster James was the first person hired into Bose Corporation’s new Human Factors Engineering and Design team.

James has a M.S. in Human Factors and Information Design from Bentley College and a B.S. in Engineering Design from WPI. James is an active member of the ACM and the UPA.

Chauncey Wilson
HCI Consultant
WilDesign Consulting

Chauncey Wilson is an HCI consultant with over 20 years experience and a part-time professor in the Human Factors and Information Design (HFID) program at Bentley College. Chauncey is currently writing a book on formal and informal methods for making products and Web sites useful and usable. Before beginning work on his book, Chauncey spent two years as the Director of the Bentley College Design and Usability Testing Center and professor in the Human Factors and Information Design program.

Chauncey has also worked as a product line development manager at BMC Software, Inc. where he was responsible for the development of complex performance monitoring software and the design of the BMC usability lab in Waltham, MA. He has been a human-computer interaction (HCI) architect and usability engineer for IDX Corporation, FTP Software, Dun & Bradstreet Software, Human Factors International and Digital Equipment Corporation.

His clients over the years have included: Michigan State University, BankNorth, Reuters, Monster.com, H. R. Block, Cabot Chemical, Johnson & Johnson, Cisco, Pershing Corporation, SeaChange International, IDX, Microsoft, Lotus, and many other firms. Chauncey co-authored a chapter (with Dennis Wixon) on Usability Engineering in the Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction and has published and presented often at UPA, STC, and CHI conferences.