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Managing Constant Change is a Constant Challenge

Interview with Kathryn Taylor

Change is, of course, constant. But few attending the Usability Week conference probably knew that better than Kathryn Taylor, who, during the seminars, exchanged text messages with family members over the birth of a new grandchild.

But it was impending changes at her job that brought Taylor to the conference, seeking tips for ways to manage the need for constant change in her firm’s Web sites. As a senior consultant and a member of the Web design team for Verizon in Irving, Texas, Taylor will be managing the usability team. “We have usability experts on our design team, but they have a lot of projects and get bogged down,” she said. “I want to know what they do and how they do what they do.

“We do a lot of usability work on Web sites for Verizon,” she added. “Designers come to us asking if we want to use tabs along the top of the screen, or use left-hand navigation. When you’ve got to use two boxes per page, do you use a gray background to highlight one of them?”

She found one session’s coverage of focus groups especially pertinent. “For us, focus groups have often meant asking the people who sit in nearby desks to look at what we are doing. Of course, they usually have not seen the material before. But it is better to have real users for a focus group, if you have the time and money, and I may be asked to do that.

“In the past we have done focus groups where they told us the material looked good, so we put it online, and sales tanked,” she added. “But as they teach here, users in focus groups are polite and try hard to accomplish the task. But at home, when you’re online, the moment you’re frustrated, you go elsewhere.”

She anticipates that change will be a constant part of her job, since e-commerce is so important to Verizon. “The cost of sales are lower with e-commerce than when using a live person to take an order,” she explained. “The more we can use the Web, the better. Many people who do not buy online will still use the Web for research and then call a consultant to make the final purchase. We want to cut the time needed for that consultant call, and it is best if they can place the order entirely through the site. But the order process for some services can be very cumbersome. Therefore, we are constantly reworking the site,” she said.

“Of course, once you make a change, you will confuse some users and lose them, and sales may sink—but sales may then later rise as users begin to appreciate the new feature,” she noted.

Of course, reacting quickly to the users’ reaction by making another change might only make things worse, and she’s hoping to eventually figure out the best reaction time for change.