The Usability Culture - Part 2

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Why You Need A Usability Culture

I have argued that only content is of direct value to a customer. Only content, for example, generates revenue. Customers will not pay for usability of itself — yet they will avoid sites without it. The cost of usability must therefore be added to the cost of the content. In a price-sensitive market, this makes usability appear to be a liability.

To have usability generally involves some cost over and above the usual costs of software development. I don’t want to go into the detail here but almost all software developed for online use has poor to mediocre usability and was developed without the appropriate skills or techniques. To make usability more widespread, we either need to reduce the cost of including it, or convince managers of its value. As someone who has, for 20 years, tried unsuccessfully to persuade managers that usability adds value, I know that this is not a sensible path to follow. But what if I could show that usability can be had at almost no cost? Wouldn’t it be foolish not to include it in all the software you use or produce?

Creating an excellent user experience is not about methods and techniques and tools. Of course, the usability expert has plenty of these but such things are easy to acquire and to learn. Anyone with a little intelligence can master them. What is really hard is having the right attitude. To build a user experience that is truly great requires the developer to hold the view that only the users know what they want, only the users know what works for them, and that, in the end, the quality of everything we do can only be judged by the users. It is an attitude that is alien to IT departments and to software and services companies - no matter what lip-service they pay to it. Yet it is the attitude you need to instil in your whole organisation to be a winner in the coming years. The organisations that get this right will be the ones the customers keep coming back to, the ones they tell their friends about.

Readers old enough to remember the Eighties will recall the Total Quality movement. The basic idea behind it was to instil the ideas of quality assurance and quality control into the very heart of an organisation's culture so that quality became an ordinary part of everyday business. The proponents of the movement had a slogan: 'Quality is Free'. The message behind this is that while organisations think of Quality as an add-on to their normal way of doing things, it will appear costly and difficult to justify. As soon as Quality is part of everybody's normal way of thinking, the cost of compliance drops down into the noise.

My message about customer experience is essentially the same. If you can change the culture of your organisation so that considering quality of user experience becomes a normal part of everybody's attitude, then achieving excellence in this area becomes the norm too and it happens without incurring abnormal costs. Essentially, my point is: since it costs about as much to do it badly as it costs to do it well, why wouldn't you want to do it well?

Achieving The Usability Culture

Having said all this, I now have to come clean. Achieving cultural change is not easy. In fact, it's just about the hardest thing an organisation can do. However, the techniques for organisational change have been developing for a couple of decades or more and will be well-known to most managers and management consultants reading this. So I won’t go into how to change an organisation’s culture. I will just describe the change we need to achieve.

The following list is of the ten characteristics of an organisational culture oriented towards excellent user experiences and provides a starting place for you to do a quick gap analysis on your own organisation. In the Usability Culture:

1. Nobody, from the CEO down, ever says they know what the user wants without having checked it first with the users themselves.
2. Everybody in the organisation knows exactly who uses its products and services.
3. Everyone in the IT Department understands the differences between content, usability and aesthetics, and the value of each.
4. Everyone on the whole management team understands the differences between content, usability and aesthetics, and the value of each.
5. Users are a normal part of design teams, stakeholder panels and evaluation teams.
6. For every delivery channel, people are always asking, what do the users think about how this channel is working?
7. Corporate standards exist for usability, graphic design, and content production for each channel and for each major user group.
8. Everyone in the IT Department, Marketing, Customer Service, Sales and other customer-facing departments understand the corporate standards and how to apply them in their work.
9. The IT Department, as well as business units which purchase IT, have procedures, which are part of their normal approach to all IT procurement or development, for ensuring the usability of their products.
10. All staff on incentive schemes have part of their bonus dependent on user experience measures for, at least, all external channels.

It may look as if I am setting the bar rather high but this is the end-point, the goal to be aimed for. Any movement in this direction will yield benefits to the organisation. In the end, this transformation is about gaining and retaining market share for online services, improving the rate of consumption of online services, and improving staff efficiency and morale. It’s about helping your customers and business partners to do more business with you and helping your staff to do more business for you. In the coming years, it will become a major issue for organisations like yours.