Building a Usability Group
As I mentioned below, I’m trying to grow a group dedicated to doing usability work at my company. This seems like a subject worthy of blogging about and I promise not to give away any company secrets.
I spoke with our COO a few months ago and he’s been helping me push usability out into the rest of the company. After a meeting with various group leaders, I’m now in the middle of attempting to have our product development process officially modified to incorporate usability as a key component in a product plan. The proposal is currently under review by the company’s product managers and today I received the most challenging question to date (and one I ask myself). Someone asked me why we need to change the development process. Why can’t we just evangelize and incorporate it into product development without making it another hoop to jump through?
Indeed. This is the approach I’ve been trying for almost a year with some success, but not a lot. I call this the “grassroots” approach to spreading usability. The problem I’ve hit and the reason I’m trying the top-down approach as well is that existing teams are not prepared to dedicate a person to usability. Schedules are so tight (or optimistic) and teams are maxed out and can’t take on another task — besides, they’ve made it this far without usability.
I hope that “forcing” projects to look at usability requirements will get them to budget for usability. I also hope that, as a result, I will be given the head count to grow a small team that can build specialized usability skills and help a number of projects. I still come back to today’s question, though, and wonder if I could have been successful if I only pursued the grassroots strategy. From what I’ve read, the answer is no, but I wonder.
Stay tuned.