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Experiences of a user's advocate
Sim D'Hertefelt,
14 November 1999
External usability consultants are
often asked to solve usability problems with cosmetic changes.
But usability problems can't be solved, they can only be prevented.
In order to be succesful as an internal usability professional,
the development organization needs to adopt a user-centered
perspective.
The challenge
With the IT market booming, it is
not an exception to become an IT professional with a non-technical
educational background. You will find people with all kind of
backgrounds, from archeologists to zoologists, working as programmers,
web designers, or project managers in IT companies. What remains
an exception, however, is that they keep their profile and provide
added value by using their non-technical expertise.
Both my educational and my professional
experiences are driven by a fascination with technology, science,
and knowledge from a social perspective: what does it all mean
to people, both the people who create knowledge and technology
as the people who are at the demand-side.
Over the last few years, I have infiltrated
the very core of technology development as a usability expert.
But because of my role as a user's advocate, I still represent
the outsider's perspective. My major intellectual and professional
challenge remains dealing with that tension between insider
and outsider perspectives and the tension between the technical
core of technology and the use people make of it.
Academic experiences
I studied sociology in Brussels and
in Glasgow and pursued my interests in the social dimensions
of science and technology with a European masters degree in
Problems of Society, Science, and Technology in Maastricht and
Strasbourg.
For about a year, I was a research
assistant at the Science and Technology Assessment and Management
Group at the Free University of Brussels. My research subject
was science management, more in particular the third function
of universities. Besides providing education and conducting
research, universities started to give more attention to providing
services to society in different forms: policy research, applied
research aimed at economic innovation, science popularization...
I studied the apparent contradiction
between two tendencies in this development. On the one hand,
scientific institutions are characterized by an introvert tendency.
They are a closed community in which only peers can participate.
A long and intensive learning process ensures that once you've
become a peer, you've adopted the norms and values of the community.
The scientific community argues that this closure ensures that
the knowledge they produce is free from economical, social,
and political influences.
On the other hand, scientific communities
show an extrovert tendency. They appeal for special treatment
by other social institutions, if only because they are paid
by community resources. In the light of the growing pressure
on scientific institutions to justify their expenses, universities
started arguing that their knowledge has special social, political,
cultural and economical relevance and that they can provide
services to other social institutions. But how can you be service
oriented when you're a closed community that acts according
to its own norms and values only?
Professional experiences
The same contradiction I observed
in technology development teams when I made the switch from
academia to industry.
Technology development teams tend
to be introvert: they develop things according to their own
perception of what technology ought to be. At the same time
they're imposing their products on the user. And when users
don't accept that product, development teams rather blame the
user for being too stupid to use the thing right than accept
that they've misjudged the user or the context in which the
product is used.
I find it a challenge to operate on
this border line and to bring the user-perspective and even
the users themselves into the development process.
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The role of an external usability
consultant
After my short academic career,
I became a consultant in technical communication and user
interface design. I developed on-line user manuals and
executed user interface design tasks as an external consultant
in a wide range of companies and sectors, from banking
to telecommunications and internet.
Despite the wide range of projects
and tasks, I experienced a major bottleneck in the role
of an external usability consultant. External consultants
are firemen. They are called when the fire hits the roof.
For usability, that usually means when users use the first
version of the product and don't like what they get.
The majority of usability assignments
sounded like: "We don't know why the users don't
like it, nor what to do about it, so please fix that for
us. Oh, and we can't do any major changes because our
next release is in two weeks and the programming team
is busy fixing bugs until then. So if you could limit
your solutions to cosmetic changes that would be great."
Usability problems can nearly
never be solved with cosmetic changes. Usability problems
arise because the whole concept and structure of the product
is based on wrong or incomplete assumptions about the
users and the context of use. This has led me to believe
that usability problems are the symptoms of an incurable
disease: they can't be solved, they can only be prevented.
The role of an internal usability
expert
That is the reason why I started
infiltrating development teams as an internal usability
expert. That was a real eye-opener. I had to learn new
methods and develop new techniques to tackle two major
challenges that I had not been able to touch as an external
consultant: the challenges of requirements and specifications.
How can you analyze and design requirements and specifications
in such a way that they can be understood, evaluated,
corrected, and approved by all stakeholders?
But you also encounter difficulties
as an internal usability expert. In order to meet the
usability challenge, the development organization needs
to adopt a user-centered perspective. That perspective
is not compatible with all company cultures and organization
structures. Technology driven development teams, for example,
resist putting usability tasks on the critical path of
development projects.
I am now working as a usability
architect for an internet development company. Compared
to classic IT providers, internet development companies
seem to be able to go a long way in adopting a user-centered
approach. There are probably several reasons for this.
They don't carry the legacy of traditional, system-oriented,
development methodologies and organization structures.
Internet companies are used to integrate non-technical
competencies, such as graphic designers and copywriters,
into their development teams. Their challenge is to integrate
the different competencies into a coherent, flexible,
and smooth development process.
Besides supply-side related
reasons, there is at least one demand-side reason why
internet companies seem to be readily adopting a user-centered
development process. Internet and intranet seem to have
empowered users to a point where they can not only easily
compare the usability of different products but also choose
the one of their liking with one single click.
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Read more about Sim's current activities: Copywriting by Kwintessens | Information architecture by Kwintessens (in Dutch)
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