Advocating User-Centred Design to Your Company? 56
Bertie asks: "I'm a UI designer at a small company who has recently found himself sidelined on certain projects. It seems that they've been sold without enough consideration given to providing a good user experience, because the deals were done on the cheap. From my point of view, providing a satisfying user experience is not an optional luxury, it should underpin every other aspect of the project. If you were me, and you had a couple of hours to promote the importance of what you do to various people — execs, sales, developers, project managers, and the like — how would you use the time?"
How to influence others (Score:2, Insightful)
Better yet, apply this to other aspects in your life. Everything will be much more successful.
Show Them the Money (Score:4, Interesting)
Instead, show them how a poorly considered UI is going to cost the company money, eg through more support calls, or through lost sales because the tool is unusable.
If you can't think of ways in which spending money on UI design is going to get money back, then you will not be able to justify the work to your employers.
And if push comes to shove, you can always take your ideas to a competitor.
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Absolutely. And if this guy has been advocating things because it's the Right Thing, the best thing he can do to restore is credibility is to say not just where good UI effort will make the company more money, but also whe
Users? Who are they? (Score:3, Interesting)
Often you can ship a project without user approval. The people that will use the program/design/machine will not see the results of your labour until it is installed and operational at the customers site. As such, users do not have much impact on many of the initial stages of the project.
People forget that users are the ones that actually use your project. If they raise hell, or if they refuse to use your new technology, then the project is often left unfinished. The company will eventually see the project as a failure. Often the vendor is blamed. It can then be really hard to ever sell another program to that company again.
Users make or break an engineering project. Users determine if you will ever sell a second piece of software to a company again.
UI does a few things (Score:5, Informative)
Looking at a UI from this perspective, it's obviously important because if a client can't access the functionality they need from your product, then they will simply think that your product is lacking this functionality (I would argue that it IS lacking it, since being able to access some function is part of that function working). Of course, this only goes so far. Following the above argument one could simply put a button for every possible function and let the user sort it out. This is where you get into the second big thing that a UI is good for. Marketing.
I've heard it said that, for any company, half of the advertising budget is wasted- the problem is nobody knows which half. For software, having a good UI is great for marketing. If anyone doubts this, promply smack them upside the face with a print out of all the people switching to OS X, or the feature list for Vista. This is where the eye-candy comes in.
Finally, for an application to really be successful, you want it to become industry standard. To make it to the point where your application is considered industry standard (or just a really good alternative) - or if you are in the business of designing software to order, then for your company to become a common name for C*Os as a development company, then you need to consider efficency of the UI.
What it comes down to is first you have to have a UI that isn't completely braindead, so that people can access the functionality of your application. Next you need to make it pretty so that people will try it, and finally you need to make it an efficent application so that people will continue to use it and buy updates.
A lot of applications are really good at one or two of these, but the ones who master all three really become big players in the software industry. It really applies to all areas of software, and product design in general. You wouldn't ship an MP3 player that required you to open up the machine and analyze the circuts to figgure out if it can play Ogg Vorbis. You don't see any new cars that are shipped from the factory with the weld seams not filed down and the body unpainted, and you don't see many cell phones where you have to go through 12 menues to be able to dial a phone number. Why would you ship software that had analagous flaws?
In the end, I think a lot of people underestimate exactly how much a UI matters, and I think that a sane argument can bring it to the attention of a lot of people. However, if you find that your arguments are going nowhere, then it might be time to start looking for a company where your talents will be valued and put to use.
How do you respond... (Score:2)
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Creating Passionate Users (Score:3, Informative)
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From the above link, by Kathy Sierra (read the rest on that site):
Here's my little unofficial guide to creating passionate users for those working in Big Companies. Most is from things a maverick (but cleverly disguised as compliant) group of us did at Sun, while we could. Only one of our original disruption team remains a badged Sun employee, but our legacy persists today in areas that won't make us famous, but do make a substantial difference in the experience that users get within the sphere we influenc
Bring a user in (Score:2)
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Good user-centric design means making things as easy and obvious as possible for the user, treating the user with as much charity as possible. It's not imagining that users are really stupid, it's designing for the user who's in a hurry, or distracted, or just doesn't feel much like paying attention. It's going from relatively easy to seamless, something with definite costs that are hard
Show them the money. (Score:2)
Show them "good" and "bad" (Score:2)
The UI is the only really "visible" thing of your software. It is what the execs of your customers, i.e. the ones that make decisions whether or not to buy, will see. It is also the only thing they will maybe at least remotely understand. Yes, even if y
One problem... (Score:2)
Poor UI costs money. (Score:3, Informative)
There are support calls and e-mails. You'll get a lot for those for simple "features" that are as simple as calling "yourapp.exe -fksd ntfs C:/Windows/YourApp/ dD33145".
It will cost the recieving company money in training, lost productivity, and generally making acquiring and retaining good employees that much more difficult.
It will cost you in maintenence, as a poorly thought out UI is difficult to maintain in the future, and a poorly laid-out feature set is difficult to reverse engineer.
Explain to your company that good UI is not necessarily adding flashy graphics or sound effects, but structuring the application logically in such a way that people with less training (and therefore, cheaper employees) can use it easily. Good UI is the difference between a well thought-out business report and a link to an excel spreadsheet with thousands of pieces of useless, unstructured data. Good UI is really expensive to tack on at the end, but can take as little as two days of planning ahead of time.
Good UI is not flash. Good UI makes employees more productive and easier to support, and isn't as expensive as people might fear it to be.
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I'd also add, if you compete in a sales cycle and the competor has a better UI than you, it could cost you the deal.
Clients want an effective UI, and bad UI design is usually ineffective as well. It could make using the product more problematic.
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Subject them to it (Score:2)
Though I'm not a UI person, I appreciate the importance of user-centered design. I found myself advocating the very same thing in a project recently, but my comments were all brushed off as just not worth the effort, until the testing phase started. Then the list of confused calls for help on how to get the bloody thing to do what they wanted started, followed by endless lists of sug
Use the time wisely (Score:2)
I am an MBA: it's not just the money. No matter what the Slashdot-gestalt says. However, you have already indicated in your post that the projects have been sold without regard for user experience. That could mean a lot of things, but for you (unless your ready to do research on the market position of your products, what the target market wants in a project, etc) that means your management does not feel that user experience contributes to the value of the product. Tha
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"I am an MBA..." -- that's great, but aren't you drawing too strong a conclusion? Perhaps management simply "does not feel that the value delivered by the proposed UI changes offsets the associated costs (e.g. increased dev time, changes to docs, upgrade effort, downtime, etc.)". The poster can certainly go somewhere else, but couldn't he/she (attempt to?) engage management in an effort to understa
It lowers support co$t$! (Score:3, Informative)
That's the best justification: a small amount of effort, ONCE, on the interface can minimize the ongoing effort of supporting the product over its entire life cycle.
Update your resume (Score:2)
If no one uses it, does it matter? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've worked for organisations where the UI was very important. It was what the customers used day in day out. If the UI was hard to use, customer's noticed it, got it wrong and support calls went up. They would agonize over individual features attempting to decide if the customer would actually understand how to use it. They would even reject customer requested features that, while sounding like something good at the time, would have been hard to understand.
I've also worked for companies where the UI doesn't matter at all. It's there purely to input test data into the system. It's poorly organised, hard to use, buggy and generally abusive. Amazingly, the customers don't care. The UI is only there to provide the purchasing manager a tick on their checklist - "Does it have a GUI? Yes. Is it written in Java? Yes." However, after purchase, every single customer then integrates it into their own call center systems and never uses the GUI provided with the system.
So, in one, a UI designer is very important. In the other, GUI work never gets funded, and rightly so.
Where does this company sit?
Jason Pollock
You're asking Slashdot? (Score:2)
Hah!
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It's not the community that's happy with the OSS UI design, it's just the posters who aggressively voice there opinion here. Else the Linux desktop would be the number one desktop and users wouldn't use Wine, etc to run Windows applications. You don't believe me? Well why then shows the OSDL survey that a majority of the Linux users still wish for Windows applications (http://www.osdl.org/dtl/DTL_Survey_Report_Nov2005
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Underpin every other aspect?? (Score:2)
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There's also a political aspect to it... This summer I finished leading the development of a replacement for my company's online order management system.
UI design in software (Score:2)
It is, pardon the stupid analogy, like a car with a broken steering wheel. If the buttons, menus, toolbars, and UI renders 90% of the functionality of your software inaccessible, unusable, or difficult to use, you might as well save time and money and not develop those features.
But we'll know in 10 years what that really means, because software development gets easier (and thus development c
Not to be pessimistic... (Score:2)
Make them happy (Score:4, Interesting)
your company (Score:2)
how likely is it that someone in sales rammed these things through at the last minute in order to keep the customer beleiving that your company is paying attention to them and make his quota?
its likely that everyone in management thinks that the user interface is important, which is why they are paying your salary. but they just dont have it
You need numbers (Score:2)
O. Wyss
Tell them how to make money with it. (Score:2)
The answer is, brands make money, and good UI makes brands work.
Why is the iPod successful despite other MP3 players being cheaper and having more features? Branding and UI.
Why is (or perhaps: was) the Tivo successful despite other PVRs being cheaper and having more features? Branding and UI.
Why
Also, consider the costs... (Score:2)
If your company is involved with product support, take the support call logs and identify specific examples of how the design of previous products could have been done in a way to reduce or eliminate the problems people call about.
If you have access to the codebase (or to friendly developers), take a look at how much wheel-reinventing happens on successive projects, a
Not enough info (Score:2)
What kind of competition do is there? Are the products custom applications or commercial products?
One thing to touch on is "People will use that which works well and is easiest to use". That is where you must direct the discussion. Show how poor UI will result in low sales.
It all comes down to the bottom line
It's all about the money. (Score:2)
And the same holds true for larger solutions too. A $40,000 discount is wort
Cost Benefit Analysis (Score:1)
What you will ultimately have to produce is a CBA (cost/benefit analysis) to support your position. Just having the management try to use the software will not do it.
To get cost, you will first need to define your strategy for implementing a User Centered Design model. Does this mean bringing in actual users to work with the designers or using a usability lab? In the former you may need to pay a user for being part of the team, in the latter you might get volunteers to test but you'll have to pay for
-ility problem (Score:2)
If you know that deals are getting done that don't meet your domain standards, whether it is security, usability, scalability, disaster recovery, etc.---you need to educate decision makers as to why your issue matters to them. If you feel they have heard your message and continue to make bad decisions, and defend the decisions to you on grounds that 'we need the business' or some such, then you have two choices:
- try to work with what you are
Speak with small words... (Score:2)
The example you should give is iPod. Say this:
iPod Sales: MMM MMM MMM MMM MMM MMM MMM MMM MMM
All Other MP3 Players: MMM MMM MMM
But don't get your hopes up. Unless you are golfing with the CEO/CTO, you are already an outsider, an
You're fighting a losing battle (Score:2, Insightful)
UI Design may NOT matter... (Score:1)
I ran a web development shop for a few years, where one of our differentiators (we hoped) was our clear superiority in UI design. Sadly, most customers didn't want to pay for the time for high end UI design. It was just a fact of the market. Some did, and we worked hard to educate all customers as to the benefit