Tips for Usability Professionals in a Down Economy
Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 4, Issue 2, February 2009, pp. 60-69
Article Contents
Tip #8: Maximize Your Visibility
Some people think that in tough economic times, with companies cutting back on staff, their best strategy to survive staff reductions is to lay low and hope nothing happens to them. I don't think so. Layoffs are business decisions. Employees who are seen as adding business value to the company are more likely to survive, and thrive, than those who aren't. If managers don't know what you're doing, you're not likely to be seen as adding business value.
Some ways you might consider for maximizing your visibility include the following:
- Invite senior managers to observe usability tests. Most managers want to know what their customers are doing, how well the company is meeting their needs, and how satisfied they are. There's a potential drawback to this approach, however, because some senior managers may only attend one or two sessions, and they might get a biased view. That's why you also want to invite them to a debriefing meeting or presentation summarizing the findings.
- Develop a "lessons learned" database. In most usability tests, there are usually some things you learn that apply more broadly than just to that particular product. Try to abstract these more general findings from your tests and organize them in some manner. And then make them available to the rest of your company, probably via your intranet. A wiki might be a reasonable way to get started and then easily evolve it as you learn new things.
- Keep others informed about what's going on. Some of the things you might want to let others know about include upcoming usability tests, highlights of recent usability tests, new lessons learned, and pointers to relevant usability findings and news from the outside world. The appropriate mechanism for conveying this kind of information will largely depend on the culture of your company. Printed newsletters have fallen out of favor in many companies because of the perceived or actual cost. They've largely been replaced by email newsletters and posting on the intranet. At some companies (including ours), the intranet homepage can be personalized by each employee by adding or deleting "bricklets" of information. For example, we do a weekly update of a "Usability News" bricklet that over 1,500 employees have chosen to put on their homepage.