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Making Usability the Foundation of a Corporation

Interview with Carol Buehrens

After getting a call from her office while attending the Nielsen Norman Group Usability Week conference in San Francisco, Carol Buehrens realized that she was already reacting differently based on what she’d learned.

“Today I got a call about changing a form that’s used by half the company,” said Buehrens, chief user experience architect at the ICW Group, a San Diego insurance firm in the commercial, auto, and workers comp fields. “It was something a business manager wanted, and last week—before I came here—I would have said, ‘Sure, change it. If someone doesn’t like it, deal with it.’ Today, based on what I’ve learned, I said ‘Let’s pull some users out of various departments and test it on them to see if it confuses their mental model.’

The business manager wanted a new option in the form, but Buehrens said she’d learned that “if the users are on task and a new option pops up, they’ll be confused. Just sticking a new option there might be the easiest solution for the programmer, but we should not do it if it confuses the user.”

Learning to deal with issues like that is the reason she came to the conference. “Our whole company is changing—from a small company with a small-company culture, to a large, first-tier company with a large-company culture. That means we will be offering more Web services and materials. So, we want to make sure from the beginning that we are doing them right—that we are not designing them for ourselves, that we are in fact designing them for the users. You can think all day that you are doing it right, and be wrong.

“My goal is to help the company offer a consistent experience from the time someone logs in, through the Web sites and the intranet and all the forms that people have to fill out. They should be able to move from one thing to the next and use the same skills,” she explained.

“Also, we have a business-to-business site for independent insurance agents, which competes with the sites of other insurance firms. We want to make it easy to transition to our site. The agents must be able to learn it quickly, since time really is money for them,” she added.

Meanwhile, the conference struck her as an excellent place to learn the ropes. “I like the energy of this group—usability, and improving the end-user experience, is why they are all here. If you want to learn Spanish, you immerse yourself in it, and that is what we are doing here, immersing ourselves in the subject.”