Tips for Usability Professionals in a Down Economy
Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 4, Issue 2, February 2009, pp. 60-69
Article Contents
Tip #10: Don't Re-invent the Wheel
Re-inventing the wheel (sometimes over and over again) is something that many large companies and organizations are quite good at. But it's not something you want to do when times are tight and resources are scarce. A usability person, especially one who is a central resource and works across multiple projects or even business units, can play a critical role in preventing this kind of redundancy. In any reasonably large organization, it's easy for the left hand to be unaware of exactly what the right hand is doing. The following are several ways that a usability person might be able to help:
- Guide project teams toward usable designs. Usability people often have the opportunity to work on multiple projects, bringing broader knowledge and experience to each project that other members may not have. They can help guide projects toward designs or design approaches that they've seen work in similar situations.
- Push back on designs that you know won't work. Sometimes the most appropriate thing a usability person can do is stop a usability test from being done. If you can cite convincing evidence either from previous usability studies or from the literature that a particular design approach won't work, then you can save the company the cost of doing a test. Of course this means you need to have that information from the previous studies or from the literature available to you.
- Be a catalyst for developing a style guide. If your organization doesn't have a style guide of some type, you should consider pushing for one. But it's not something one usability person or usability team can do alone. Participation and buy-in from various parts of the organization are needed for a style guide to succeed. Don't try to boil the ocean. Start small and let it evolve. The most successful style guides I've seen are ones that also had accompanying re-usable components that project teams could easily incorporate.