Repositioning Usability

Anyone who has worked in the field of user inteaction design will know what a hard sell it is in all but the most enlightened of organisations. IT departments and IT services companies are often the most resistant customers. Why is that?

Well, I believe that, after 25 years in the business, I've finally worked it out. Below is the abstract and conclusion from a paper I've just written on the subject. The full text can be found at:

http://graham.storrs.cantalibre.com/compulsion/repositioningusability.html

ABSTRACT
In the IT services industry the various specialisms which deal directly with usability are generally considered of little value – in fact, of so little value that they are dispensed with entirely in the great majority of development projects. Some efforts have been made to cost-justify usability but IT suppliers and customers remain unconvinced. This discussion paper argues that the main reason for the perception of the low value of usability is because it is incorrectly regarded as a property of IT systems. The paper argues that a more realistic view- and one that accords better with best practice in the field - is that usability is a property of business processes. In particular it characterises the quality of the communication of the people participating in these process with the tools, equipment and media they use to assist them.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
It is clear to almost everyone that the software services industry is not doing a good job for its customers. It is also clear that, despite some inroads into product development, usability is not thought to offer much of value, even to an industry in such disarray. I contend that this is because the services which usability professionals are offering tend to have very low intrinsic value except in the area of task redesign. Task redesign, I argue, is the same as business process redesign. In this area, usability professionals have a huge contribution to make because process engineers have largely neglected the issue of process usability. Usability professionals have developed an extensive collection of task analysis and design approaches that help ensure process usability and these methods and techniques could profitably be adopted in industry. Beyond even this, the use of iterative prototype and evaluate cycles to create usable processes, has the potential greatly to improve process quality. Finally, I have argued that, to make use of these methods and techniques, organisations must radically change the way they procure IT projects. Specifically, they should fully specify their business processes, down to the level of a detailed interaction design, which would then form the basis of an IT procurement.