Selling Usability: Convincing Colleagues and Management

  • Washington D.C.: Friday, May 18

Kara Pernice
Full-Day Training Course

Do you want usability to succeed at your organization, but are not sure where to begin? Or have you already made some inroads but find you need support for usability from people who won’t listen, don’t understand, think usability conflicts with schedules, or think usability conflicts with making money?

I have been there and I can help.

What You’ll Learn

  • Evangelizing usability at all levels of the organization
  • Ways to be effective and get usability methods and processes accepted in your organization
  • How to get usability findings accepted even when they contradict managers' or designers' personal beliefs (overcoming the "HIPPO" syndrome of designing according to the "highest-paid person's opinion")
  • Practice methods and tips and tricks to manage the usability process
  • How and when to grow usability as a function

Course Outline

  • Working effectively on usability methods with people in various functional roles
    • Upper-management
    • Middle-management
    • Peers in: Development, IT, Marketing, Product Management, IA, User Interface Design
  • Understanding motivation
    • Schedule
    • Goals and objectives
    • Bonus, salary, and budget
    • Global organization perspective
  • Usability measures that convince
    • ROI
  • Websites
  • Intranets
  • Software
    • Productivity
    • Subjective satisfaction
    • Money they spend
    • Competitive edge
    • Videos and live tests: Understanding and empathizing with customers and constituents
  • Setting usability goals and measurements
  • Prioritizing your work for maximum impact
    • If you're the only user advocate around
    • If you manage or are a member of a small usability team
  • Involving colleagues beyond the usability team
    • Usability champions
  • Communicating effectively
    • Meetings: Project status and other
    • Technology
    • Processes
  • Usability in various organizations
    • Matrix
    • Centralized
    • Decentralized
  • Growing a usability team

Format

This full-day tutorial includes lectures and exercises, and some usability video highlights.

Course Materials

Copies of the presentation slides

Who Should Attend

This course is for anybody who takes the usability view of interface design and wants to convince more people in their organization to come on board. Participants are expected to have a general understanding of usability, because this course doesn't talk about what usability is, but only about how to make it more successful.

Instructor

photo of Kara Pernice Kara Pernice is the Managing Director at Nielsen Norman Group. She has more than 20 years of experience in UX design and research, and has established successful usability programs at Lotus Development, Iris Associates (an IBM subsidiary), and Interleaf. She chaired the Usability Professionals’ Association 2000 and 2001 conferences, and served as 2002 conference advisor. She has led many of NN/g’s intercontinental research studies and generated the resulting design guidelines. She coauthored the book Eyetracking Web Usability as well as many other research reports, including Designing Corporate Intranets, Designing for Accessibility, Designing for People Over the Age of 65, and Designing Websites to Maximize Press Relations. She judged the submissions for and coauthored NN/g’s its Intranet Design Annuals since 2001 (2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, and Government Intranets Report). She is a leading authority on intranet usability and eyetracking usability (The Wall Street Journal called her “an intranet guru”). She has also done extensive research in evaluating emotion and design, given presentations on a wide range of topics, and worked with clients in various industries, including publishing, entertainment, technology, finance, pharmaceuticals, and government. She has more than 20 years of experience in UX design and research, and has established successful usability programs at Lotus Development, Iris Associates (an IBM subsidiary), and Interleaf. She chaired the Usability Professionals’ Association 2000 and 2001 conferences, and served as 2002 conference advisor. She holds an M.B.A. from Northeastern University and a B.A. from Simmons College.