Tutorial: 27. Selling Usability Into Organizations: Strategies for Convincing Management of the Value of Usability

Sarah Bloomer, The Hiser Group; Rachel Croft, The Hiser Group; Susan Wolfe, The Hiser Group

Benefits
You will learn techniques for convincing management and development teams of the value of usability in a way meaningful to their organization.

Origins
This is an update of a highly rated tutorial from CHI 97.

Features

• barriers to and opportunities for usability activities
• techniques for communicating the value of usability to your organization
• aligning usability activities with business goals and objectives
• translating usability information into terms each target audience understands
• practice in developing usability strategy for an organization
• analysis of real-world cases

Audience
Usability professionals, user interface designers, developers and their managers who want to improve the acceptance of usability activities within their organizations. Consultants who wish to convince potential clients.

Presentation
Lecture with team exercises and group discussions.

Instructors
The Hiser Group has consulted to a number of large clients in Australia over the past four years, facilitating the introduction of usability at the organizational level. Sarah Bloomer, Rachel Croft and Susan Wolfe have worked with numerous clients including Telstra, NCR, Kodak, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, GE and IBM. Their expertise includes style guide development, cost-justification, ethnographic methods and sociological issues.

Related Tutorial

• 12. The Usability Engineering Life Cycle (Sunday)