adrianLiem

I attended a seminar from VanUE tonight hosted at the Habaneros office downtown. It was a talk given by Paul Sherman, Director of User-Centered Design & Usability at Sage Software and also Vice-President of the Usability Professionals’ Association, on the topic of “Partnering With Change Agents in Your Organization: A Story About Collaborating With Six Sigma Practitioners To Make a Better UI”.

It’s always interesting to hear about the “battles won” when it comes to user-centered design. It would have been interesting to hear more about the team dynamics that emerge when you take a very business-centric process model such as Six-Sigma and combine this with UCD. Nonetheless, there was a lot of useful information to learn from.

Some of what I tought were the key tips were:
1. Collaborate: find natural partners, leverage your strengths, and present a united front to stakeholders
2. Build the business case
3. Manage the project well
4. Get over yourself (where “yourself” refers to “you” as a UCD practitioner — which I really like, because there really IS a tendency for those of us who pride ourselves on understanding user needs to be well, proud of what we think we know…)
5. Learn to influence
6. Be humble, respectful…and tenaciously persistent.

There were also some insightful comments made throughout the talk and the night about the interplay of different disciplines. One of the observations Paul had shared was that “very few of us (“us” as in UCD practitioners) can implement as well as we can research, evaluate & redesign”. Similarly, at another point it was also mentioned that having strong project management skills, in fact having skills grown out of formal training, can also be tremendously beneficial.

Indeed, this is where the collaboration and partnering becomes incredibly valuable. It can be very hard to be all things to all people. But it sounds like if you can do that, you’ll be a very valuable person to any UCD team.

An interesting article appeared in today’s Globe and Mail, Backlash forces eBay to reverse pet plan.

eBay had been considering plans to allow users to sell pets through their online auctioning system, but after these plans were revealed on a discussion board, the company received thousands of messages urging eBay to uphold its previous policy of banning the sale of pets online (with the exception of fish and snails). In response to this outcry from their users, eBay changed their minds and, as before, pets will not be allowed to be sold.

This story reveals either a SNAFU on eBay’s part, or a little glimmer of brilliance.

The SNAFU: If it was only by chance that a manager revealed this plan on a discussion board, it’s likely that eBay would have already dedicated resources towards developing this new service – and even if it was only some initial costs, it would still have been costs that could have been avoided.

But, the potential glimmer of brilliance: What if eBay had only been brainstorming this idea internally (with the only sunk costs being the time and people involved in meetings and planning) and then used the discussion board to put out the feelers to see what their users thought about the idea? What a clever way to get meaningful feedback directly from their users — users who, by being those who frequent the discussion boards, are likely some of the company’s most valued customers.

The lesson learned: If you have an idea for a service offering, it’s absolutely vital that you develop a strategy for assessing how this service will be received by its target audience.

By doing a little more due diligence and employing user-centered design processes, you can save yourself from a lot of extra costs (not to mention a lot of extra work) by focusing on services and products that will gain user buy-in.

You may not have the luxury of your own discussion board to test the waters, but there are other channels to gather feedback. You could use direct lines of connection like a mailing list or an invitation for feedback posted on your homepage. You could also try indirect lines like tapping into a discussion board or online community where you know your users frequent, or attending events where your target audience is and actually talk to them face to face (imagine that, f2f contact!), or carry out some market research of your own and piece together a picture of your users based on information, case studies, and examples that already exist online.

The bottom line, know your users.