May, 2009 – The Evolving Institutionalization of Usability: User Experience as Strategy

Susan Weinschenk: Hi, I'm Susan Weinschenk, Chief of Technical Staff and Services at Human Factors International and welcome to our broadcast today. Our topic is Getting Started with Institutionalization of User Experience and I have here with me today, Dr. Eric Schaffer, the CEO at HFI. Welcome!

Eric Schaffer: The role model of user experience in the institutionalized world.

Susan Weinschenk: Oh my goodness, I guess that's an alternative title to our webcast.

Eric Schaffer: Yeah, do you think I should do that?

Susan Weinschenk: Or is that an alternative job title?

Eric Schaffer: That's probably good.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay. So Eric, your book came out, what year did that come out?

Eric Schaffer: Well it came out in 2004 but we were working on it. The first white paper was 2001.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: So it was at least 2000 when we started.

Susan Weinschenk: Alright, okay. It has been...

Eric Schaffer: A long time.

Susan Weinschenk: 9 years.

Eric Schaffer: A really long time.

Susan Weinschenk: That you have been talking about institutionalization, right? How is it going? Let's get an update. That's our topic today. Where are we at with this idea of institutionalization of user experience within companies or organizations?

Eric Schaffer: You know what? It's really interesting that institutionalization has been moving ahead really at a steady pace.

Susan Weinschenk: Yes.

Eric Schaffer: It started out with companies doing individual small things.

Susan Weinschenk: Like?

Eric Schaffer: Like I am going to put a standard in place or offer some training.

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: That built and built from there and now we have more and more companies that are being more serious about it and they are being more serious about it in a bigger sense because we are no longer talking about really, institutionalization of just classic usability but we are talking about the larger sense of user experience.

Susan Weinschenk: Well now, what's the difference?

Eric Schaffer: Well so in classic usability, what we have done is dealt with whether somebody can do something, so that's the classic view of optimizing the visual intellectual memory and motor activity of the user.

Susan Weinschenk: The VIM model.

Eric Schaffer: The VIM model, right? And optimizing the speed, accuracy and training required.

Susan Weinschenk: So that's what we do around usability.

Eric Schaffer: Now user experiences are more and more, we are dealing with persuasion, right? So classic usability, we look at things like how many key strokes. So when you go up to an ATM, do you have to key in the cents even though you can't get cash in say, pennies? Well, if I could cut out the two key strokes times...I get shorter queues, right?

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: Or sometimes, you see cases where you almost can't apply. So we have one client and most of their people who apply for a loan drop off because it is so frustrating. You had to click "Apply Now" four times. So you go to your client for a Visa card or a loan or whether you are trying to order something online, what you can do is still a little bit of a challenge.

Susan Weinschenk: What you can do efficiently, that's the traditional usability.

Eric Schaffer: Traditional usability. Now that's expanding something in the sense that what we are starting to see is not just the attention to interface but to the ecosystem.

Susan Weinschenk: The ecosystem? Right, what do you mean by the ecosystem?

Eric Schaffer: So we used to worry about just what's inside the interface.

Susan Weinschenk: What's happening on the screen or with the remote control?

Eric Schaffer: Yeah, exactly. So a lot of times, we are building interfaces for maybe an employee and they are sitting there in front of the screen and they are typing stuff in and it is a very contained "I'm using the computer" view.

Susan Weinschenk: Right, we're using a particular piece of software and you have that particular user.

Eric Schaffer: Exactly but now, in bigger companies, we have computers floating all over the place, in handheld devices, in cell phones, built into some machines. They're kind of getting everywhere and people have integrated them into their lives more so you can just no longer think about just one person using one computer.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: You have lots of computers, you have lots of people and they are working in an ecosystem that all has to fit together.

Susan Weinschenk: So is the ecosystem just the environment that they are working in like you know, they are in an office versus they are in a medical clinic, something like that?

Eric Schaffer: So it is the environment but it is also the multiple people and the dynamics between the people so in India, for example, where cell phones are shared a lot, when we design cell phones, we worry about the fact that teenagers borrow them, they go on dates and when they come back, they need a quick way to delete all the messages so their parents can't see what happened.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay. So what I was going to say is that we have always been interested in usability about the environment and we have always known we have more than one user, right? We had user groups and personas and now what you're saying now that this is- does this have to do with user experience then that we start caring about the ecosystem?

Eric Schaffer: I think it's a part of user experience idea is that you worry about the ecosystem, you worry about multiple channels. So if you're looking at a bank, we are not designing just an online banking experience, we're worried about how that integrates strategically and in terms of the user experience with the voice response system, with the ATM, and with the bank teller system and the mobile system so we have all these.

Susan Weinschenk: So we're not talking about the usability of a particular piece of software or a particular interface or particular website.

Eric Schaffer: So that's a classical usability view where it's like, is that a radio button or a check box?

Susan Weinschenk: Right. Now you're talking about a much larger issue. What is it like, what is the experience of that human like as they go through the entire cycle of your products and services?

Eric Schaffer: Right so the view is much bigger, you have to be bigger and the value is much more in terms of what we have.

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: Now beyond that, we have the "can-do" and the "will-do", the "will-do" is more about the emotional experience. Right, so when I go to buy a lottery ticket, why do I buy a lottery ticket? It's not an investment, lottery tickets are not investments.

Susan Weinschenk: They're not investments?

Eric Schaffer: No.

Susan Weinschenk: You know, most people would say that you're buying a lottery ticket because you hope that you're going to win.

Eric Schaffer: Right. You buy the lottery ticket for the experience of hoping you're going to win.

Susan Weinschenk: Because you're not going to buy it because you're going to win.

Eric Schaffer: You're not going to win. Come one, I mean grow up.

Susan Weinschenk: I know I'm not going to win.

Eric Schaffer: You know you're not going to win but you buy it for the excitement, right?

Susan Weinschenk: That I might win?

Eric Schaffer: And so if I have an interface which is boring, it doesn't support that emotional experience. If I have an exciting interface, then what you've got is something like "Oh okay yeah, I'm getting my value."

Susan Weinschenk: So the exciting interface is not, I mean it's not just exciting that you will buy the ticket?

Eric Schaffer: Well it makes the experience worthwhile.

Susan Weinschenk: So you already bought the ticket.

Eric Schaffer: So from a classical usability point of view, do I want the number that wins to come up immediately? Of course, I'll get through the interface.

Susan Weinschenk: It's more efficient.

Eric Schaffer: And it's more efficient.

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: But will it be more fun?

Susan Weinschenk: So in that sense the purpose of the site is not to get the number.

Eric Schaffer: No, it is to entertain.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: It's to give the experience of excitement and to optimize that. Now that's a whole lot of energy here and there are so many different ways in which we can look at persuading people to do things. For example, we are looking at improving the uptake of vaccines.

Susan Weinschenk: By improving the uptake you mean...?

Eric Schaffer: How many people get vaccinated...

Susan Weinschenk: Oh vaccinated.

Eric Schaffer: In rural areas in India. Okay, so when you do that, obviously you want to make it more efficient. So people can come in and get their vaccines faster, right?

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: No, so the problem is that if nobody is waiting on line, that's a bad thing.

Susan Weinschenk: I know why that is – social proof, social validation.

Eric Schaffer: Yeah.

Susan Weinschenk: If no one is waiting in line, then this must not be a very good thing to do and I'm not going to get in line because it is not- nobody's doing it.

Eric Schaffer: Right. So remember growing up in Grants village and Ray's Pizza suddenly had a line all the way around the block.

Susan Weinschenk: And then you think that is good.

Eric Schaffer: Just got in line for pizza. So it's the same thing. We want to have a line where people wait. That's opposed to classic usability.

Susan Weinschenk: So do you make the line longer to get the vaccination?

Eric Schaffer: You may.

Susan Weinschenk: That's different.

Eric Schaffer: It needs a fine way to get people to voluntarily get vaccinated. It can do, and it will do, we also need breakthrough.

Susan Weinschenk: Breakthrough?

Eric Schaffer: Yes, so in usability it is becoming more about innovation. Innovation means that I look outside the box so for example, we have lines at ATMs how do I fix that?

Susan Weinschenk: Wait a minute, lines at ATMs isn't that a good thing, doesn't make you want to join the line?

Eric Schaffer: No. Everyone knows an ATM is good, the vaccine you're not so sure about. So how do I, what do I do? If I want lines shorter, I can buy more ATMs, right?

Susan Weinschenk: Yeah.

Eric Schaffer: Or I can make it a little bit more efficient.

Susan Weinschenk: Make it faster to get things.

Eric Schaffer: Or I really have a breakthrough and I'm going to say, "I know who you are when you put in your card and I know what you normally do, you always get $100 out."

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: So as soon as I see your card, I say "Do you want $100?" click, you're done. So I made it radically more efficient.

Susan Weinschenk: And so is that the breakthrough part rather than the question of moving where the button is on the screen or removing the typing in of decimal places.

Eric Schaffer: It's really thinking about it in a whole other way.

Susan Weinschenk: Thinking about it in a whole other way.

Eric Schaffer: Which is again higher value; all these things are higher value ways of doing usability and that's changed over the last decade.

Susan Weinschenk: Now wait a minute, what do you mean by higher value?

Eric Schaffer: Well, what I mean is that usability goes up the chain from looking at small design things like "Is the radio button right?" that's important but how much value can you have?

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: To get people to be willing to go in to buy something – much bigger value.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: To really looking at it from the highest strategic level.

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: So companies have strategies where they look a given market, they decide which market. They have a unique selling position in the market, they have a brand to the market they have a set of offerings. Usually they have a sort of that corporate strategy formed and then they send off teams to do the IT work and what not in order to make it happen but really the thing that holds together the corporate strategy is the model of using. Right so if you look at any corporate strategy it's always about "we're reaching out to this population in a given way" and so that's the thing that needs to hold together and can hold together corporate strategy and that means that instead of a usability person being down in the trenches.

Susan Weinschenk: Right that's what I was going to say.

Eric Schaffer: You know, you can help things stay pretty.

Susan Weinschenk: So you're really changing the role of the usability person in an organization.

Eric Schaffer: Right.

Susan Weinschenk: Rather than, and I mean I don't mean to imply and I don't think you do either that if you've got a traditional usability person in a traditional usability role so they are really thinking of the details of the screen and the project, it's not like that's not important. But you're saying that rather than, that's all they do, there can be 5, 10, 15 or more people just doing that, you now have that person or at least one of them is doing a lot more and operating at a much higher level in the company over with the people who have the strategic persuasions?

Eric Schaffer: Yeah. So what you're doing is you're moving up the value chain in the organization and the value chain goes from low-level design, which has value and is also needed, to things like looking at the overall ecosystem and setting channels, that's a much bigger view. Looking at persuasion is a bigger view and looking at strategy is a bigger view. So that's changed and we're starting to look even at global strategy, looking at ways the offering can be fit to the world. So you find banks that are doing things like Islamic banking. It is specialized banking for the Islamic community. That is a huge differentiator and a huge business opportunity and you get there by really understanding enough about your customer population. So you need to be able to reach out into the customer's world, wherever it is in the globe and make that the foundation for everything from business strategy and persuasion all the way down to what fields are on the screen and whether they are justified or not.

Susan Weinschenk: So is this, is institutionalization how we get there?

Eric Schaffer: So institutionalization is really the way we bring this view to the world so if we do it as an individual, we're just craftsmen going out and saying, "Okay I've got somebody good, they can go in." We can't do it on an industrial strength basis. We need to bring the understanding of how humans operate, we need a deep understanding how they make decisions, how they are motivated, into our corporate toolset. So there's a whole set of things that we can do and this slide is the Schaffer-Weinschenk, that's the two of us.

Susan Weinschenk: That's amazing, the name of that.

Eric Schaffer: Yeah. We picked that, by the way, so that you can just spell Schaffer or Weinschenk, we already know that you're a knowledgeable person, right?

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: So but this list is what we really think about the things that the usability team can do but all of it is done, from strategy to evaluation, all of it is done in the foundations of institutionalization. So institutionalization is no longer just to do usability tests and expert reviews and structure, but we have to look at strategic things, we have to look at international things, we have to go look much further.

Susan Weinschenk: So institutionalization has really evolved from when you first wrote the book.

Eric Schaffer: Exactly. We're no longer talking about just simple classic usability

Susan Weinschenk: Although that still holds.

Eric Schaffer: Absolutely, so for example with persuasion, if the user can't find it, they can't be persuaded about it. Right so you still need to do good basic...

Susan Weinschenk: That's your foundation you still have to have core usability and core institutionalization.

Eric Schaffer: Yeah.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: Alright. So what you see is organizations, and this usability maturity model still stands, have a critical point where they go from ad hoc usability where you've got really some "yes I can do some standards and I can do some training" but it's piecemeal. So managed usability happens at the point when you have strategy in place, where you have managed usability where there is an executive champion and this executive champion says, "This is my plan to do usability on a sustained process-driven basis."

Susan Weinschenk: Now we've had, we've talked about having an executive champion for many years. Are you saying though, it sounds like, isn't that the person who is involved in all the strategy? It sounds like, before you were talking about the fact that usability people who tend to move up the chain. Do they just do that or they go through the executive champion or are you saying it's kind of a new world and that having an executive champion won't do it all for you.

Eric Schaffer: So they are two separate things, one is the executive champion who is going to guide in setting up a team and do this but with this, it changes, what they do now reaches much further in the organization.

Susan Weinschenk: Than it did before. Okay.

Eric Schaffer: It has much more value to the organization. One of the things we have been doing with companies is what we call the 360 Strat. The 360 Strat is about going into an organization and doing a 360-review.

Susan Weinschenk: Now what's a 360 review?

Eric Schaffer: So that...that's the review which looks 360 degrees around.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay, well what does that mean?

Eric Schaffer: So what that means is that we look customer-phasing, what do the interfaces look like? What do the channels look like?

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: What kind of issues are going on with them?

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: And in our internal phasing, what kind of user centered design capabilities are there? Do they have an organizational structure that is effective, do they have staffing that is effective?

Susan Weinschenk: Okay so we're evaluating these products and interfaces but we're also evaluating their institutionalization and their maturity.

Eric Schaffer: Right, even things like acceptance in the organization, executive championship, all those things you're going to need to look at and then developing a strategy to go forward and to deal with the internal challenges.

Susan Weinschenk: So it gives us a snapshot of where they are right now and what they need to do to progress.

Eric Schaffer: Right, exactly.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: And that snapshot is partly about coming about what I talked about years ago as the mantra. So what I talked about was the idea that nobody wants to buy usability. Nobody wants to buy user experience design. It's actually like, "Okay, do you want dentistry?"

Susan Weinschenk: I never knew there was a dental analogy coming here. Right, do you really want root canal?

Eric Schaffer: No, but I don't want my tooth to suffer and I really nice teeth.

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: So what we need to do is understand exactly what user-centricity means to the organization and boiling that down to something that makes sense to the organization, you can capture wallets, capture markets, capture service costs and contain service costs.

Susan Weinschenk: Now it reminds me of when we used to talk about ROI – return on investment and people always ask me what is the ROI formula as though there was one mathematical formula, you know? E=MC2 or something and I didn't give them that. There isn't one.

Eric Schaffer: There are a lot.

Susan Weinschenk: Right, here what means user-centric to this organization is not the same as to another.

Eric Schaffer: No, definitely. I had one organization where their mantra was something like venture capitalists won't invest in e-commerce companies that have awkward sites.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: That was their mantra.

Susan Weinschenk: That was they cared about.

Eric Schaffer: So it isn't always just cut costs or even sell more, you have to get deep into the organization.

Susan Weinschenk: So you're saying if you know that mantra then you can design that strategy?

Eric Schaffer: Well, that's actually, it is part of the strategy and also it is the phrase that the executive champion has to walk around saying.

Susan Weinschenk: All the time.

Eric Schaffer: All the time.

Susan Weinschenk: In order to get buying, in order to get funding.

Eric Schaffer: Even everyone in the organization, they need to get out of the habit of saying, "Our organization needs more user-centered design" and start saying, "We need to capture wallets, capture markets and contain service costs."

Susan Weinschenk: Whatever their mantra is.

Eric Schaffer: Whatever it is, right.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: Okay, we need to look better for the venture capitalists, right? Okay, now there are some challenges that you typically see in organizations, now we've got enough experience and there are a lot of them out there, and I'll share just a few of them, okay?

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: So one of them is the gap between reality and the aspiration that the executives have for user-centricity. So it's funny, you would think that high aspirations are good.

Susan Weinschenk: Yeah.

Eric Schaffer: But there is a point at which, if you climb at the beginning stage and you're being told " we want world-class user-centricity which would be our differentiator in the market" where it just seems impossible.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay, because if they have nothing.

Eric Schaffer: Then how do I get there? This is the point.

Susan Weinschenk: So it's too big a gap.

Eric Schaffer: Right, so one of the challenges we find is that your line of interest are a lot of expectation or way high expectations.

Susan Weinschenk: Really?

Eric Schaffer: Yeah.

Susan Weinschenk: So how do you win?

Eric Schaffer: We have to educate people to understand what is reasonable to expect.

Susan Weinschenk: Where you are now.

Eric Schaffer: Or sometimes if there are high expectations, we could say, "Okay, the price tag may be high but it's probably worth it."

Susan Weinschenk: But here's what it's going to take to get there.

Eric Schaffer: Here's what it's going to take.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: And then it could take multi million dollars to get there quickly but that's okay, it's easily worth it in the long run for the organization.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: There are many other kinds of syndromes that kind of push organizations down. So, for example, one of my favorites goes back to the first joke I ever heard.

Susan Weinschenk: The first joke you ever heard?

Eric Schaffer: First joke I ever heard as a child or the first one I remember.

Susan Weinschenk: What is that?

Eric Schaffer: So I grew up in New York City and the bus is broken at the bottom of the hill so the bus driver jumps out and grabs this woman's Chihuahua and ties it to the front of the bus.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: And says you know, "Okay I'm ready" and the woman says, and ‘What are you doing with my Chihuahua"? And he says, "I need to get the bus up the hill" and the woman says, "A Chihuahua can't pull a bus!" and the bus driver says, "No problem, I have a whip."

Susan Weinschenk: And did you laugh at that?

Eric Schaffer: No, it wasn't that funny. So what happens is that managers come out and they say, you know, "We want you to be user-centric, we want you to be innovative", it's like what do I do with that?

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: Right, so this kind of mentality that managers just think you talk about it and it happens.

Susan Weinschenk: You whip more or you push more.

Eric Schaffer: Right. So you have many of these kinds of syndromes.

Susan Weinschenk: So you say you find these when you do your 360 Strat?

Eric Schaffer: Absolutely, lots of these kinds of things.

Susan Weinschenk: But these are really the things, both the aspiration gap and the syndromes, these are the things that actually block or prevent progress.

Eric Schaffer: Completely, so unless you can reach out to the executives and get them to change their ways of thinking then even though you have this wonderful strategy...

Susan Weinschenk: You might not get there.

Eric Schaffer: Right.

Susan Weinschenk: So is that a hard thing to do, to get the executives to change, to reframe it?

Eric Schaffer: Yeah and so you have to get them to think differently and it can take a number of cycles of contact with them, different examples and it depends on what the syndrome is. I remember one senior vice president who decided that he was going to design about INIT and he went and said never use the scroll bar.

Susan Weinschenk: That would be interesting.

Eric Schaffer: Yeah, interesting but not good, right?

Susan Weinschenk: No.

Eric Schaffer: So these are the kinds of things that we need to learn how to grapple with and that's really the core of the 360 Strat process. We also, we need to assess what's going on so our people follow the user-centered design process, we have people and they have metrics that allow us to say you know how likely are you to get the process to be doing well. If you get 15 points out of a 100 on the scale, it's not so good.

Susan Weinschenk: So we can assess whether they have a UCD process in place, we can assess whether it's a good process but then we can also assess if that is going to be following.

Eric Schaffer: That's correct. So have we a winning process that nobody is following? So we use the usability quotient to evaluate project histories and say, "Are we doing processes like we were?" Right, we also look for other kinds of syndromes about how a team is working at that time. So for example, a lot of times, groups start, "oh we put a usability group together" and they start buying usability testing. So it sounds good.

Susan Weinschenk: It's better than nothing.

Eric Schaffer: Yeah but to some extent the problem is that you can't design well by usability testing so all you do is you keep saying, "This isn't good."

Susan Weinschenk: Right, this is progress.

Eric Schaffer: Second thing, this is boring.

Susan Weinschenk: Right, and frustrating.

Eric Schaffer: And they're going to catch you in the parking lot.

Susan Weinschenk: No.

Eric Schaffer: No, but it's definitely a risk.

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: So what we want to do is find these kinds of syndromes that are happening. Another thing I see sometimes that the team is doing really good usability work but it's not flashy. So for example, if you are doing personas, I go and look at a nice persona and say, "Oh, oh yes, beautiful personas, beautiful wireframes" but the executives look at the personas and go, "What's that for?" So we need to have things that give a good sort of quantitative results, good exciting results, or we miss it, right? We see other cases where the teams are so overloaded so we know that an organization needs about 10% of their development staff working on user-centered design stuff.

Susan Weinschenk: So if you have you know a thousand people in the IT department.

Eric Schaffer: There should be a hundred of them doing user centered design work.

Susan Weinschenk: There...that doesn't happen.

Eric Schaffer: Well, we're getting closer and closer in organizations but when you go in and when you see not 10% but a quarter of 1%

Susan Weinschenk: Yeah, 0.001%, I had, we give these talks right and I had one of them come up to me and say, "We were just calculating and we are at 0.00001% or something." Somebody did.

Eric Schaffer: Well, so you need to have a strategy around that so that's a part of the consideration in the plan. If you have not nearly enough staff and you approach it by putting them in fire-fighting mode, then no one ever sees the value of what they do because they are all in fire-fighting mode, right? And so they look like, why are they there, they just run around frantically? And they seem pretty disturbed and sad so it doesn't work. You can really get kind of, what I talk about the graveyard spiral.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: It's a pilot thing.

Susan Weinschenk: Oh, okay.

Eric Schaffer: It's actually how Kennedy died. If a pilot, who is not instrument ready to fly is on a new cloud, their life expectancy is 7 minutes.

Susan Weinschenk: Really?

Eric Schaffer: Yes and the reason is what happens is that they start to come around like this and because of the way it is coming around it feels like they are right-side up and everything is okay but they are literally upside-down. So it feels like you're okay and that you're moving along and making progress but you're really upside- diving into the ground.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: Right and that's – many of the usability organizations are like that.

Susan Weinschenk: They think that everything is going fine.

Eric Schaffer: They think that it's going fine but still it's hard but we're going to be okay and then they're gone. That's because they can't get beyond that chicken-and-egg problem of I've got executives looking and going "what is this, I don't see much value" and so they don't invest and so they are running around frantically and they don't get the value. So this is one of the most dangerous things for a usability group. Graveyard spiral, it's a bad thing. So what we're doing is we're looking at those kinds of syndromes and we're looking, and this is the chart that I put down in the book so long ago, of building an institutionalized process and we're building a version of this that really fits the organization. This is stated as a generic step-by-step process. So there is a set of things that need to be there and so we've looked at that process and go to a written strategy where each one of these boxes has maybe fifty pages or a hundred pages...

Susan Weinschenk: Oh, wow!

Eric Schaffer: Of detail under it in terms of what's being done.

Susan Weinschenk: So there is a lot of substance.

Eric Schaffer: Oh yeah, it's quite a bit of work because you have to say each one of these things, what is it, what should it be? It isn't a simple, "oh, okay, we'll do some training."

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: It's not that simple, right?

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: So we need to look at a bunch of different stuff, we need to look at the issue of "do you have an executive champion?"

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: But a lot of times, they still don't really. So there could be an executive who is supportive.

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: There can be a manager who is passionate.

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: But sometimes to have a real executive champion, sometimes is not there, right? So we need to have a strategy how to get an executive champion there if there isn't one, absolutely first priority and then hopefully in the future, as soon as possible to get a CXO - Chief User Experience Officer.

Susan Weinschenk: That is often or sometimes the same person, does it go up or not necessarily?

Eric Schaffer: So sometimes it's the User Experience Manager who gets promoted to the executive suite, sometimes somebody in the executive suite says, "I'm passionate about this."

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: But in either case, he needs to be someone in a high enough level to reach across through the entire user experience so that they can get the en silos.

Susan Weinschenk: So does that become your executive champion? Or you don't have an executive champion – that is your executive champion?

Eric Schaffer: Well, sometimes you have a lot of executive champions, that's really good.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: But that's your core. That's the person who is responsible in the organization and we're getting people doing that. Even training is not so simple.

Susan Weinschenk: No, it's not because you can say, "well, let's get trained" but who, how much, what kind? The kind of training that someone needs who is going to be a usability professional in that company is one thing, the kind of training that the programmers need to work with the usability professionals is different, but the product or project manager's need because usability is now going to be done on their projects, is different.

Eric Schaffer: Right and how that goes over time.

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: Some of the refresher training and of course, the training of the executive suite is as important.

Susan Weinschenk: And different.

Eric Schaffer: So training is one of those things that are not so simple. So things like standards, methodological standards, design standards.

Susan Weinschenk: That's not simple either.

Eric Schaffer: Well there is a lot to do there and figuring out when you need it and what type you need, that's all important.

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: The other thing that we, I think we found ourselves getting more and more involved in as the years go by is the organizational structure of the usability operation. So if you have a usability operation that's placed in the wrong place, it doesn't have the right communication channels, it doesn't have the right internal structure, I think you end up having a failure built in.

Susan Weinschenk: I remember when your book first came out, this was, I think we all got wondered on the webcast and I think this is the question we get the most of – What's the best structure of a usability organization? And where in the organization should they be?

Eric Schaffer: Yeah, well, that's right. So we get HR should it be in, Marketing should it be in and IT and all that and then should it central or distributed but there are far more issues beyond that.

Susan Weinschenk: Even beyond that?

Eric Schaffer: Yeah so it's not just "so where is it placed?" it's the internal structure. What kind of staff do you have doing what kind of roles for a given size of organization?

Susan Weinschenk: You have specialists, you have generalists.

Eric Schaffer: Right. So there's a tension between them. I need generalists who may be out on a project, working on things but what if I need somebody to deal with the issue of accessibility that the generalist doesn't know? How do I handle both? And then how do I take you know, fifty different groups of generalists and to have an overall consistency to their design, you need somebody looking at the overall architecture. It's not that trivial. So the organizational structure has turned out to be a key piece to success.

Susan Weinschenk: Of whether it's going to succeed or not.

Eric Schaffer: Absolutely. Another thing that is just starting to come up...

Susan Weinschenk: This is a very daunting diagram.

Eric Schaffer: It's actually the plot of usability projects in one organization.

Susan Weinschenk: Oh, really?

Eric Schaffer: Yeah and we have been remodeling it. The interesting thing about it is, it's a log right? Over time, but the thing is what happens to the content that's invalid, so what happened to them is that they ended up with 1.77 Terabytes of data on a file system and they couldn't find it.

Susan Weinschenk: So you're saying, you know, they knew they had done this somewhere, "I remember this, we did a project with all these users 3 years ago, I wonder if we can re-use any of that information?"

Eric Schaffer: Well, and you've done a screener and you have research results, where are those results?

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: And so you need it to be pulled back together.

Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Eric Schaffer: And we need to have the ability to have the metrics to overview the entire user experience in order to evolve it as a system.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Eric Schaffer: Now this is some of the most cutting-edge stuff we're just working on and I think it's really the future of institutionalization.

Susan Weinschenk: Now does that go beyond, we have had a usability central, and we have used...

Eric Schaffer: So usability central is a tool, it is a package which has the standard methodology, standard design, standards zone, that's great.

Susan Weinschenk: But you're talking about even beyond that?

Eric Schaffer: So now we have to start taking the knowledge of the customer.

Susan Weinschenk: That doesn't have the history.

Eric Schaffer: Right, it doesn't have history and it doesn't have specifics down to the scenario, down to the user, down to the environment, down to the type of project that you're doing.

Susan Weinschenk: Well you know, it's interesting because I was talking not too long ago to a client, who said you know, "we don't have a usability group and we have these people in little pockets all around the world" and it's a large Fortune 500 company, "And we're thinking maybe we need a centralized usability group" and I said, "Well that's really interesting because you have 3 different usability groups, I've worked with them for the last 20 years."

Eric Schaffer: Right.

Susan Weinschenk: And they had no idea! They didn't even know they had the personas, they didn't even know they had a usability group but they had a system like this and they're not collecting any of it.

Eric Schaffer: Right, so you start from scratch. So a lot of – the key to institutionalization, the value of it is not starting from scratch.

Susan Weinschenk: And to re-use this knowledge.

Eric Schaffer: Right we are moving from re-using just the templates of processes to re-using knowledge of processes.

Susan Weinschenk: So it's re-using the usability.

Eric Schaffer: Yes, so a whole new world. So we're supporting this whole methodology in a very systematic way and helping our clients to set up the institutionalized processes, I think is a major value to them. I think that it truly opens up another level of quality in RTO.

Susan Weinschenk: So what would you say would be a first step if someone watching says you know, "We've done some institutionalization work but we really do need to take it to the next level." What would be a first step in this case?

Eric Schaffer: So the first step is to get the executive champion in place and the strategy.

Susan Weinschenk: Okay so really concentrate on those two things.

Eric Schaffer: That's right. Those things, if they are not in place...

Susan Weinschenk: Don't go any...don't try anything else.

Eric Schaffer: Then you're just demoing things to get those in place. So if you don't have an executive champion, well at least to get you moving, you need to demonstrate some projects to win enough attention to get that. Once you have that, then that 360 Strat process that allows us to look at who is the executive champion, what does he know, what is the environment and what strategy addresses that? That's the thing that will really make a difference in catapulting an organization ahead. Unless you're doing that, it's all piece-meal. So strategy is still the key.

Susan Weinschenk: Strategy is the key, any last parting advice for our audience before we end today?

Eric Schaffer: Well, as Jay More says, our president, "Usability is great business to be in, user experience is a great business and we add a lot to the world but to continue to do that at the scale that we need to, we need to do it in an industrial strength way."

Susan Weinschenk: Thank you very much for joining us and thanks to everyone for watching.

Eric Schaffer: Thanks.

QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION:

Question: Can you have an institutionalization strategy without an executive champion?

Eric Schaffer: Sure you can have a strategy. You could work out a logical and systematic process to institutionalize usability in your organization. But that process should start with the job of getting a champion because without a champion you are not likely to get much actually accomplished beyond piecemeal projects. Having a real champion is essential.

Susan Weinschenk: Yes, but it will take you longer to put the strategy in place. If you don't have an executive champion, it's a good idea to put a strategy together and talk about it to everyone. Often the strategy will attract a champion.

Question: How do you show the value of the UX team to the other business teams within the organization?

Eric Schaffer: It is great to show them success stories and cases from other organizations but there is nothing like internal examples. We want concrete improvements with solid metrics of success.

Susan Weinschenk: What is most effective is to have an internal client tell the story of the value your work brought to their group. An internal client sells it for you.

Question: How do you measure ROI on investment in UX design?

Eric Schaffer: The cost is offset by a set of key results. What are the key results? They vary based on the organization's business goals. It might be increased basket breadth. It might be reduced returns. It might be decreased call handling time. Before doing usability work, we need to define how the work will pay off and if it does not pay, don't invest your time.

Susan Weinschenk: Check out the webcast we did a few years ago on ROI for specific suggestions – "The ROI of Usability and Making Usability Routine" at http://humanfactors.com/downloads/pastwebcast.asp

Question: How long should it take to develop a fully mature UX program within a large organization?

Eric Schaffer: Plan two years to get the full operation in place and have it functioning smoothly.

Question: You recommend that 10% of the development be dedicated to UX. How do we justify that expense or sell it to management?

Eric Schaffer: First, it is actually free. You save that much and more in development costs and time by reducing violent design interactions, avoiding development of facilities that customers don't need and by using interface standards then you gain in conversion, training costs, support costs, customer goodwill, etc.

Question: Who develops the UX strategy? Does that come from the UX team or the management team?

Eric Schaffer: The UX team holds the strategy but the decisions in the strategy are collected from many stakeholders.

Please visit http://connect.humanfactors.com/forum/ for further discussion on this topic.

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