Day 54 - CURE / USECON

Day 54 - Tuesday / Daisy only 10 days to go

Today I get to meet more of the team and to hear from then of what and how they do their work. I also get to present what I have been doing and some of the things I have gleamed in my trip so far.


Yesterday I borrowed a book from the CURE library to read on Usability. The book "Selling Usability" highlighted for me that one of the perspectives that I am applying to my research is correct in that there need to be an alignment between the practitioners of usability and business. Business gets caught in the traps of the past in many respects as that if they don't understand a topic they pass it on to others or are not buying in to the topic, no matter the savings. That is because the practitioners of this topic rarely have the knowledge of business to communicate on the terms of business. 


In the book they gave a great example which outlines two ways to communicate the message needed to get the job done. One is the way of a usability focused person:

Techie Talk

"A recent usability test indicated that 17% of users do not understand how to enter the discount code. Furthermore, they indicated that the entry field is too short and should be larger. We are confident that the results are statistically significant given the sample size and experimental design" 

Business Talk

"We know that customers can't figure out how to enter discount codes on our web site. I reviewed this with our sales team; we're losing about $24k per month. They also indicated that we're at risk of losing 10% of our customers permanently. I spoke with the design team and we can fix this problem for $80k. "

Selling Usability - John S. Rhodes - WebWord.com

The second conversation did not speak about user experience as per the UX jargon. It talked about loss, risk and a fix. It has indicated that the ROI would be relatively short with a longer term  benefit which the business can understand and realise within 3-5 months.


The important part is the understanding that these topics and expertise needs to be shown to a business in such a way to show the business the value proposition. In doing this business can see and realise the loss and risk and understand the cost and ROI of the proposed solution. It a better understanding of how that response is given which will further this topic.  


During my time today I had three meetings. First up was a team meeting with the CURE and USECON team members. I presented what, why and how I was doing my research as well as some of the findings that I felt I had learn't to date. After that presentation it was open to questions and I got some really get questions. 


"Where do I feel the adoption of UX is with other organisations and companies?" was one, but the question that I felt was more interesting was after a presentation of one of the team members on her methodology in assessment of usability was "What is usability or user experience?" this created some discussion as there are many definitions. It raised a further question unless you know what it is you are assessing then how do you measure it. How do you quantify usability and or user experience. There was some discussion and some views but I could see that this is quite a large question and has given me some more food for thought and further research to carry out.


Following that meeting we went to lunch and on our return I then has a meeting with two members of the team and we discussed a number of different things from what I had been working on and what they were doing at CURE. After this meeting I then meet with Michael Bechinie Senior Consultant / Team Lead and Peter Strassl Senior Consultant. In our discussion we covered many and varied topics but the interesting one was our discussion on methodology of approach to work in UX.