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Jonathan Mann
Instructional Designer / e-Learning Developer
Intel |
Leave it to the trained professionals—user-interface design is serious business
by Jesse Berkowitz
Companies like Intel have terabytes of data to manage and organize, which is not a job for just anyone. However, as it's become easier to post content on intranet sites, this task has been delegated to administrators.
This trend worries people like Jonathan Mann.
"Doing user-interface design well requires a great degree of skill," he says. "It involves much more than just slapping content on a page. Creating an intuitive navigational structure takes a lot of work"
Consequently, Intel's knowledge management team (to which Jonathan belonged) investigated how people actually find information online. They realized that Web usability is critical to organizing data effectively.
Eager to learn more, Jonathan took HFI's training and earned his CUA credential in 2002. Jonathan grasped the concepts easily because of his background in instructional design. Many usability principles are based on these same fundamentals of psychology, learning styles and human perception.
"Usability added a nice dimension to my skill set," remarked Jonathan, also a self-taught Web designer. "It relates either directly or indirectly to many different fields. It's just important to make sure your organization supports user-centered design."
To this end, Jonathan recommends being able to demonstrate how usability translates to actual cost savings and added revenue. He recently used HFI's return on investment formula (see chart) to show how his improvements would save Intel $1 million worth of employees' time over the two-year lifespan of a particular application.
HFI's Return On Investment (ROI) Formula:
Calculating Increased Productivity on an Annual Basis
(# of users) x (tasks/day) x (days/year) x (increased efficiency) x (loaded salary) =
Annual ROI
Example:
Reorganize intranet to increase efficiency by nine seconds per task
Assumptions:
# of employees
Loaded salary |
5,000
$40,000 (~ $21/hr or $.35/minute or $.00583/sec) |
Tasks / day
Increased efficiency |
12
9 seconds / task |
(5,000 employees) x (12 tasks / day) x (230 days / year) x (9 sec) x ($.00583 / sec) = Annual ROI of $724,086
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"Up until then, all of the arguments for doing usability work on this particular project were 'soft'. They focused on user confusion and wasted time, but didn't have any hard numbers to drive home the point," says Jonathan. "But if you don't pay attention to usability, it definitely has a negative impact on productivity."
He jokingly defines a successful interface design as "one that I don't hear about again—as in, no tech support calls."
Jonathan enjoys the design heuristics involved in creating a usable interface, such as layout, color, and typography. He also appreciates the research and science behind those decisions.
"I definitely wouldn't have been as successful if I wasn't directly trained in usability by HFI. It's extremely beneficial to have these skills."
Intel has a total of 18 CUAs in their company.
For a complete list of CUAs, please check out our CUA Directory. |
