Corporate Strategy and Usability Research: A New Partnership

Judee Humburg

Usability Engineering Manager
Intuit, Inc.
P.O. Box 7850
MS 2535
Mountain View, CA 94039
415-944-3019 voice
415-944-5060 fax
judee_humburg@intuit.com

Stephanie Rosenbaum

President
Tec-Ed, Inc.
P.O. Box 1905
Ann Arbor, MI 48106
313-995-1010 voice
313-995-1025 fax
stephanie@teced.com

Judith Ramey

Associate Professor
Dept. of Technical Communication
14 Loew Hall, FH-40
College of Engineering
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
206-543-2588 voice
206-543-8858 fax
jramey@u.washington.edu

Keywords

Business direction, cross-functional teams, customer data collection, design methodologies, market positioning, partnering, product development cycle, product life cycle, strategic planning, usability, user-centered design, user data collection

Workshop Description

Usability research findings can contribute strategically to the definition of a product family during early planning and design. Rather than waiting for user-testing of prototypes, we can learn about user task habits, preferences, and concerns to identify product opportunities and help define a product's business direction and market positioning. Early usability research methods can collect specific user data needed to plan the product scope, a compelling feature set, and early design prototypes.

This workshop expands on the organizers' previous CHI tutorials to explore how practitioners apply early and iterative usability research as a strategic tool: partnering with other groups in our companies, building cross-functional teams of usability, marketing, development, and support people.

The workshop brings together practitioners who have:

Incorporated iterative usability research into the phases of the product planning and development process
Evaluated the trade-offs of investing limited usability resources during these phases
Tried to establish usability research processes and findings as contributors to the strategic planning efforts in their organizations
Attempted to build cross-functional teams to achieve this vision

Workshop participants have prepared papers describing their organizational environments, what they have done to integrate usability research into their company's strategic planning, what methods they used, and how well their efforts worked. During the workshop, participants will discuss the papers, and use them to create a list of issues and questions that relate to the workshop topic.

By discussing this issues list, the participants will design a model process for how to integrate usability research into companies' strategic planning. This model process will include both likely successful paths, based on our participants' experiences, and pitfalls to avoid. After the workshop, the organizers will write a report on the workshop for publication in the SIGCHI Bulletin.