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Mark Maxted of Blue Coat Systems describes how understanding the "readiness" of an organization can affect your tactics for introducing usability and user-centered design. More info at www.chopsticker.com
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Organizational Readiness
mark maxtedSenior Principal Engineer
Blue Coat Systems
Tactics for Success
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Motivations
● Why do usability initiatives so often meet with only qualified success?
● Why did a technique I used with great success at one company fail miserably at the next?
● Why am I so frustrated?
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Dimensions of Readiness
● Technical● Process● Cultural● Product/Market
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Technical Readiness
● How flexible is the underlying architecture?
– How often do you hear “we'd have to change our architecture” in an engineering response?
– Can you easily change data presentations?
– Is business logic separated from the workflow?
– How many interfaces do you have to support?
● How agile is your interface toolkit?
● Low: business logic and presentation intertwined and hard coded.
● High: well layered, “evolvable” UI technology
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Architectural Readiness
concrete user interfaces
abstract interface
virtual machine
features and services
platform
platform independence
agile toolkit
application/ business logic
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Process Readiness
● Are corporate processes (and the process to change them) well defined?
● Do they incorporate usability?
– What is the process for generating product requirements?
– Who owns the lexicon?● Are processes for UI and underlying technologies
distinct?
● Low: ad hoc processes, requirements expressed as features, individual engineers dictate terminology
● High: requirements expressed as use stories
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Cultural Readiness
● Technophilia vs Interdisciplinary Respect
– We don't know what we don't know
– People who don't know this aren't ready● Use ad hoc demonstrations
● Do QA and Customer Service have a say in requirements? What role does Docs play?
● Low: engineering claims “we know our users”
● Medium: usability is about panel design
● High: focus is on end to end customer experience
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Product/Market Readiness
● Emerging technologies and markets are feature driven
– Audiences are poorly defined
– Management reacts to early adopters
● Mature technologies are solution driven
– Audiences are better defined
– Management can turn down “distractions”
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Tactical Summary
● Do's– assess your
organization's readiness– recognize inertia– have realistic
expectations– be patient and
adaptable– develop a roadmap– exploit opportunities to
fund your roadmap
● Don'ts– act too far ahead of
your organization's readiness
– try to change too many things at once
– spread yourself too thin.
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