Results

For businesses fighting the tide of the economy, spending money on user-centered design seems like an illogical thing to do. However, that is exactly what a recent webcast from Human Factors International suggests. The well-known usability company is helping businesses prepare for slow economic times by focusing on connecting with users through great design. Some of their suggestions include:

• Adopt “wide-angle lens” thinking

To weather a rough patch, businesses should focus on long-term goals and stay the course on projects that will extend beyond a short-term slowdown. As the webcast pointed out, most recessions in recent years have lasted just 17 months or less, and many businesses have development cycles much longer than that. By keeping an eye on the ultimate goal, you can ensure that you will be prepared with the best offerings once the situation improves.

• Spend where it counts

According to a recent Forrester report, top organizations across industries are spending money to improve usability and make online customer interactions more enjoyable. While it may seem counterintuitive, laying out a little money on research can make a big difference during economic times. Unfortunately, this is often exactly where companies cut back. However, by getting to know your customers better and investing in their needs, you can help stabilize profits and revenues by keeping loyal users and attracting new ones.

• Innovate

One sure way to avoid the pitfalls of a recession is to innovate a new product or service that gets consumers excited. Our economy is largely based on faith, and if consumer confidence increases, so does consumer spending. A revolutionary new product or service can gets users buzzing and spending, and it can uniquely position your business to survive a slowdown intact.

• Align across teams

Many businesses streamline their employee structure during recessions, often with layoffs. This does not have to be the solution if you can foster communication and organize teams to perform at a higher level. Just as geese fly in a V-pattern to reduce drag and improve efficiency, you can align efforts to reduce overlap and improve workflow. One way to do this is through collaborative tools like WIKIs and online document sharing. Give teams the ability and incentive to share knowledge, work together, and improve performance; this will eliminate duplicative efforts and save you money and man-hours.

• Validate and measure success

While this is an important development step for any product during good economic times, it becomes doubly useful during a recession. Test features, gather user feedback, and apply metrics to help with future upgrades. By continually improving your service and features, you ensure that customers will continually find new value with each visit or interaction. This builds loyalty and excitement for your product and gives users the assurance that their needs are recognized and implemented.

Though we all must make changes during an economic slow-down, it is possible and even essential to keep the value that your users require. By thinking long-term, investing in user experience, providing innovative products, cutting down on internal overlap, and continuously improving products, businesses can ensure that a recession does not sink their prospects. Visit Human Factors International for more information and additional webcasts.

Usability testing for websites has gone from a nice option for big companies to a necessity for everyone. Real-world users are more demanding than ever before, and web-based companies are putting practices in place that ensure the best experience for users of all descriptions. However, a good user experience is made up of several different key factors, some of which are based in psychology and some of which are purely technical. In order to ensure the best customer experience, you should consider not only your user’s gut reaction to your site, but also their computer’s gut reaction.

Conducting user testing on a website is generally designed to measure the psychological aspects of usability. The goal is to see how a sample user will find the information or product they need, if they’re able to intuitively navigate the site, and their first impressions of your company or product based on the site. A good example of this can be found in the testing done by the usability team at Bungie and Microsoft prior to the release of Halo 3. They carefully tested all the aspects of game play to ensure that players were having fun, that the tasks were not too difficult, and that the game flowed smoothly from one scene to the next.

This can also be accomplished when building a website for public use. You can recruit participants at a coffee shop, from employees, or from friends and family to explore your site and critique the design. To get the most detailed responses, consider asking the following questions:

• How did you find out ….?
• What did you expect to see when you …?
• Was it clear what steps you were supposed to take?
• What do you think would happen if you…?
• What features did you find particularly useful/useless?
• Did you find that text/photo/video helpful or distracting?
• How does this experience compare to our competitors?
• What questions would you like to see in our FAQ?

Answering these questions will give you a complete picture of how users react to your site’s design and architecture. This psychology-based approach can help you push out new features or pare down existing features based on your customer’s expectations.

Another aspect of usability, however, is the actual nuts and bolts of your site. How long does it take to load? How fast is your user’s connection? Can your site handle a huge spike in traffic? These are the hidden aspects of usability, and they’re often overlooked since much of the testing is done internally. Here are some important metrics to test your website’s technical performance:

• Connection speed
• Browser used
• Objects loaded
• Time to load
• Video playback
• User location
• Peak usage times

Making a list of checkpoints like the one above can help you conduct comprehensive performance evaluations. This will remind you to test your website on a dial-up connection using Internet Explorer 6, or on an office broadband using Safari.

Internet users are becoming less and less patient, and a slow load time or incomplete experience can make the difference between making a sale and losing a customer. Even if your design is beautiful and your architecture is intuitive, you still could be turning away customers because of technical shortcomings. There are plenty of tools out there to help test website performance, and one of the leaders in this industry is Gomez. They have web-based products to implement website monitoring on all levels, as well as white papers to help you educate yourself about optimization techniques.

Remember, today’s internet audience is sophisticated, demanding, and fickle. They can, and will, go to a competing website if they cannot quickly and easily find what they need on yours. Usability practices, both technical and psychological, can make the difference between retaining or driving away customers.

Almost every enterprise within the software or application development world has acknowledged the need for metrics to measure the usability of their products. However, as a recent Baseline Magazine article points out, almost no one is measuring the development process itself, which means that our processes are largely untested, inefficient, and potentially wasteful. Up to this point, the only research most managers do into their team’s success is to walk through the bullpens once a day and ask, “How’s it going?”

This isn’t because of a lack of desire or a belief that this type of information gathering is unimportant. As Forrester researcher Carey Schwaber told Baseline, “The common units to measure developer productivity are variable or inaccurate. The fundamental problem is that it’s difficult to size software.” In other words, the metrics for measuring the development process have not been standardized, tested, or scaled to the industry.

For this reason, most organizations gather absolutely no data on how their process is working, if they even have a formal process at all. Forrester research found that just 63 percent of managers had metrics in place at all, not to mention whether or not action was taken as a result of the data. Also, the metrics they mentioned are general business concerns, and they are not specific to application or software development. Common measurement points include employee productivity, cost management, defects, and scheduling; none of these points are tailored to what design and development teams actually do.

For this reason, we’ve decided to make a short list of metrics that can be used specifically to measure the success of application development teams. Here are a few metrics to consider implementing within your development process.

Quality of product at each stage - Check often for problems or errors within the design. These act as the metrics within the metrics. It’s important to keep a running tally of issues at every stage so they can be solved as the need arises or as the project progresses. One of the factors of success is to show the client a working, quality proof of concept at key intervals. This lets your client know that you’re paying attention to details and you won’t forget to take the small steps that make the finished application high quality. This will also help convince the client that more time is needed if you run into scheduling concerns. While fast food customers might want poor quality as quickly as possible, your clients probably don’t. They’ll be willing to wait if they know the finished product will be better in the end.

Effective management - The old saying, “There are too many cooks in the kitchen,” applies well to application development teams. Top heaviness is a sure way to create communication problems, which leads to a poor quality product. If your organization is structured in a less-hierarchical model, nominate one member of the team to take charge of communicating and assigning tasks. Make sure your team has strictly defined roles, and check often to be sure that they’re collaborating and sharing key information. A great way to ensure collaboration is to use a project management application like Makibie Connect or Open Workbench. These tools are designed to encourage communication and track scheduling for a team with diverse roles.

Skill development - This is a great way to measure the success of your team in the long term. When an individual developer can add new skills or knowledge to the process, you are better positioned to deliver unique value to your clients. If your group develops new skills or gains new insight, you have a great barometer of the success of future projects. This metric also has the bonus of looking into the past. Did your team create a better product than last year because of a seminar they attended or a new employee with unique insight? Measuring the skill development of your group can show you not only short-term success but also long-term growth.

Business value - While it’s easy to dismiss this category as cost vs. return on investment (ROI), business value can be much more than simply tallying up your profits on any given project. If the application you deliver does not support any of your long term business goals, it does not matter how much money it brought in. A good example of this is in Starbucks’ recent decision to discontinue breakfast sandwiches. Financially, they were a success for the coffee giant, but they did not support the brand or the quality coffee that is Starbucks’ primary focus. The same concept should be applied to application development. Not only should a product be financially successful, but it should also give your business a boost towards meeting fundamental goals and values.

User satisfaction - This is undoubtedly the most important of all application development metrics. Whether your code is perfect or your clients are pleased with the design, the only opinion which really impacts your success is that of the user. The best way to ensure user satisfaction throughout the development process is to implement frequent testing. The more users who examine your project, the more chance you have of getting it right. Ideally, testing should be done every time you show the client a new prototype. This will provide you with a laundry list of changes that need to be made before the next cycle.

Most teams are asked to improve their productivity, quality, and cost-effectiveness, and most have no idea how to do so. These traditional metrics serve simply to justify your team’s existence to the powers that be, but that is not always enough. Using a set of data points specific to application development can not only justify your existence, but also prove your unique value within any given enterprise.

Much buzz has surrounded the recent release of Halo 3, and much of it has focused on Bungie’s and Microsoft’s usability efforts. Wired.com ran an article earlier this fall describing the usability process that Halo 3 went through prior to release. The game was tested by hundreds of participants, and their reactions to every aspect of game play were monitored through one-way mirrors by psychologists and usability experts. These in-depth studies were conducted to ensure that the game was not too difficult to be fun, intuitive, and would provide fans with a consistent experience across the brand.

This marriage between applied psychology and usability is becoming more common in the corporate world, and it is the very essence of providing a user-centered product. Heuristics and error prevention are wonderful tools to use in web development, but they do not ask or answer the essential questions of human behavior. Is your application fun to use, is it easy to figure out, does it frustrate the user, or does it aid him/her in accomplishing something desirable? How does a user feel when using this site? At ease or infuriated? Indifferent or engaged?

Because Halo 3 is a wildly popular game and expectations were high for the end of the trilogy, the developers had to be sure they had the tools to answer these questions. With psychologists monitoring every move, participants tested all levels of the game, providing data both verbal and visual to the psychologists. For example, if the main character “Master Chief” was getting killed by evil aliens too quickly or at the same point in the game, the experience would not be much fun for players. The data collected by psychologists suggested that players were dying at certain points because they couldn’t find ammunition stockpiles or didn’t see an approaching cliff. They solved these problems with simple graphics tweaks to keep the game fun for players.

One of the other overall strategies of the Halo developers was to limit bloody, intense battle scenes to 30 seconds. This is another example of applying psychological principles to create highly usable applications. Experts are divided about the actual average length of an adult’s attention span, but they generally agree that it is shrinking. Though interested in the game, Bungie assumes that users cannot concentrate on the intensity of a battle for much longer than 30 seconds and still enjoy themselves.

By employing psychological testing on their newest product, Bungie and Microsoft have another critical success with Halo 3. Using the methods and tools of psychology can explain not only when users are succeeding or failing, but also why. It takes into account what they feel when they visit your site: frustration, peace, anger, fun, or satisfaction. We could all take a page from the gaming world’s book in creating applications that seek to entertain and ensure the satisfaction of the user.

Long gone are the days of “counters” at the bottom of a web page, eagerly tallying the number of visitors to a site. Not only are they outdated, but they also don’t accurately indicate the success or failure of a site. After all, it’s possible that half those visitors left your site immediately, blinded by the bold red font on a blue background or annoyed by the pop-up ads. Counters also do not tell you what a visitor did on your site and if they were able to find what you were hoping they would find.

Analytics can help where counters cannot by providing more than just the number of views but also more detailed information which can help you fine-tune your website’s performance and usability. They can tell you where a visitor is located, what pages or buttons on your site are particularly sticky, how long they spend browsing, and at what point they left. Analytics, when done right, also present your data in a format that anyone can understand and interpret, and they give you the feedback you need to make your site usable and successful.

Analytics provides the user with metrics, i.e. measurements, that help determine how visitors are using a site. Metrics include any number of the following:

• where a user is located (based on IP address)
• click path throughout your website/application
• what task they did last
• what type of browser they use
• which page is the most popular
• how each of your pages performed
• how many unique visitors access a site
• how much time a visitor spends on a site
• if a visitor is new or returning
• which areas of a page they clicked on
• which page a visitor “bounced” or left the site from

While all of these metrics can give valuable information about a site, some are obviously more pertinent than others, and this largely depends on the purpose of the website itself. If your site focuses on e-commerce, you’ll want to know how visitors found you (what site they linked from), how they found the item in which they were interested, whether or not they purchased that item, etc. Knowing how your site is used will help you better tailor your website for your customer.

On the other hand, if your website is content based, you’ll be more interested in how long a visitor spends on a page, and how they got to your site in the first place. A website like CNN would use this information to determine what types of stories capture the attention of visitors, and they would cycle the headlines appropriately. A popular blog might form partnerships for sponsored links with other similar blogs, directing traffic to one another. A health care provider might set up an FAQ section when they realize users are leaving their site because they cannot find the information they need. This is how analytics increase the usability of a site. The criteria they measure provides the feedback designers and developers to conduct usability studies. Some analytics services, like Clicktale, record a user’s visit like a movie, allowing you to see exactly where they progressed naturally and where they stumbled or failed to find what they needed. The metrics provided by analytics help determine your level of success in making a usable site.

It use to be that only large web companies with big budgets implemented some form of analytics, because the service was often prohibitively expensive and the data was difficult to understand. All that changed in 2005 when Google released its free tool, aptly named Google Analytics. This created an explosion of websites using analytics to track their website’s visitors. Nowadays, only the tiniest of websites go without metrics. Analytics are not a nice supplement any more, they’re a necessity. Smart website owners will take the information gathered by analytics services and implement the changes implied by this data. For example, if the vast majority of your visitors are coming from Québec, consider a mirror site in French to serve those users. If your visitors always bounce on a particular page, put some serious thought into changing the look or organization of that portion of your site. Analytics are only useful if their “advice” is heeded. For those who use this service correctly, analytics act as an ongoing usability test that allows for constant improvements in the performance of the website, making adjustments in the user experience and ultimately ensuring success.

What are your customers really doing?

Reviewing website metrics is the easiest and most efficient way to see how your customers use your website. In examining this information, website owners can gain a sense of how many people are visiting their website, where the visitors are coming from, where they are entering and exiting, the average number of pages viewed per visit, and other facts that will educate the website owner. These statistics will allow you to better analyze how your customers are using your website including the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

The goal of website traffic analysis is to assess how well or how poorly your website is working for your visitors. From these statistics you can gain valuable insight around how your customers are using your web applications, and if necessary, make enhancements to improve the overall customer experience.

The following terms are commonly found in most analytic tools:

Hits: There seems to be some confusion regarding the terms used to describe website visitor traffic. We usually hear website owners speak in terms of “hits” to their website. Hits don’t accurately describe the number of visitors viewing the website – they are actually just any sort of HTTP request made to your server. Not only are requests made for website pages, but also for all the images and other files associated with viewing a single page. Therefore, one page view could actually result in dozens of hits. If a single user visits many pages on your website, this visit could generate hundreds or even thousands of hits. This can excite some website owners, but this number is not a reliable indicator of how many people have actually visited the website.

Number of Unique Visitors: The term that website owners want to focus on is the amount of unique impressions that are generated by their website. A unique impression will measure the number of actual people visiting the website based on their IP address, browser, and operating system. No matter how many “hits” a visitor registers on your website, the server will record the session as one unique visit. Thus, the number of unique visits gives us a much better idea of the amount of traffic the website generates. What we want to look for is a trend in the average number of unique visitors. On a day to day basis, there may be a good amount of volatility in the number of unique visitors, but we want to pay attention to the trend of the average number of visitors per month. Optimally, we’d like to have the number increase on a monthly basis.

Entry Page Statistics: From these statistics we can learn which page people are using to enter your website. Most visitors will enter from your home page, but you may notice that up to 50% of your website traffic originates from a page other than your home page. It’s important that your website has an easy-to-use navigation structure to ensure that visitors can find the information they are looking for, even if they don’t enter through your website’s main page.

Bounce Rate: The bounce rate can be defined as the percentage of people who visit your website and immediately leave. Don’t get worried if your bounce rate is high – most websites have a bounce rate of about 50% or so. If the bounce rate is unusually high, you can experiment with your website to try and retain more visitors. Maybe you need more enticing graphics, less text, faster loading pages, or a more engaging design.

Exit Page Statistics: These statistics will show you where people are leaving your website. When you know which page is losing the bulk of your website’s visitors you can experiment with some changes in an attempt to retain more visitors.

Average Time & Page Views Per Visit: Website visitors are very goal-oriented and task-driven. Upon visiting your website, most visitors will merely scan the page to quickly determine whether or not it contains the information they are searching for. By analyzing the average amount of time spent on your website and the average number of page views per visit, you can determine how engaging your website’s content is. The key to retaining visitors and increasing the number of page views is to have relevant and interesting information on your website. Remember – content is key!

Top Referring URLs: This statistic lets you know where the bulk of your website’s traffic is coming from. This is important if you’re pursuing a website marketing campaign or search engine optimization campaign because you can easily judge the campaign’s effectiveness by looking to see how many visitors each marketing method is generating.

Top Search Words & Phrases: This information will let you know which keywords and phrases visitors are searching for in Google and the other search engines in order to find your website. With this information you can gauge the effectiveness of a search engine optimization campaign, or get an idea of how your website’s keyword density should be altered to position it for the keywords and phrases that you’re targeting.

Country of Origin: If your product or service has global appeal then knowing where your customer comes from globally is important to you. For instance, if you own a retail store that caters to the European Union and you notice that 90% of your website traffic is coming from the U.S., then it can easily be determined that you need to rethink your online marketing strategy.

Companies who do not measure the customer experience of their website or applications are at a disadvantage because there are so many businesses out there that do and those companies are capitalizing on what they have learned. There are several free and easy-to-use applications such as Google Analytics, which allows businesses to measure their success in metrics. For more advanced applications or richer measurements Gomez is a better choice.

Paying attention to user needs and analyzing how your customers are using your website will ensure that your web applications are easy to use and will increase the chances that your customers will want to come back again and again.

The term “web accessibility” means simply to make more of the Internet accessible to more people. Usually the term implies greater access for people with disabilities. These impairments may include visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities. Initiatives to improve web access in this way can include speaking guides that render web pages in an audio format for the blind.

However, web accessibility is not limited to any single population but is a principle of web design that makes sites and software more flexible in order to meet vastly different user needs, preferences, and situations. From a grandmother in Boise managing her grandchildren’s photos online, to the PDA belonging to a plumber in New York that gets an alert from an email program, to a paraplegic athlete in Quebec who uses special tools to access the web; the ideals of web accessibility seek to accommodate all, as if serving a single individual, website or piece of communications technology.

Why Is Web Accessibility Important?

Because the Internet has become such an important resource when it comes to education, employment, government and health care, it is essential that it be made more accessible to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with disabilities. Additionally, providing greater access to the web can help people with disabilities play a greater role in and achieve more fulfillment from society.

The possibility of unprecedented access to information and interaction for all people, via the Internet, has become even more real with the advent of usability and accessibility. Web technologies are easily overtaking the accessibility barriers to print, audio, and visual media, for the benefit of us all.

One of the hidden advantages of web accessibility is that it also makes the quality of the code that programs websites better. Many of the practices that are used to make a site more accessible are the same guidelines that developers should follow as part of good coding practices and is also what a good designer does to make a site more usable.

Making the Web Accessible

While it is web developers and the software that they use that are the infrastructure that pave the way for web accessibility, it is really the responsibility of CIOS and managers to value the benefits of making their websites accessible to a greater audience. The organizational decision-making needs to favor software that helps developers produce and evaluate accessible Web sites, and be usable by people with disabilities.

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) develops guidelines and techniques that describe accessibility solutions for web software and web developers, among other roles. The WAI guidelines are considered the international standard for web accessibility.

To learn more, read: Essential Components of Web Accessibility.

In terms of your company’s presence on the Internet, your website is everything that your customers, your employees, and your support staff are able to see. Despite being a two-dimensional world, you can do a great deal more with your website than you can with your office, and you can do it faster, cheaper and with greater room for creativity.

Of course, the same rules of common sense and decorum apply to the Internet as much as anywhere else, even if sometimes that evidence is in short supply. Try to approach the design and functionality of your website from the perspective of those who will actually be using it, the golden rule being: Do unto others as they would find easiest done. Find ways to get feedback and act on the information you’ve been given to move in a more constructive direction. At the heart of user-centered design is the notion that users gravitate towards what suits them best. The more users you have, the more robust your business will be.

1.) Usability Basics

You want to make sure you have a simple, easy-to-use website…but likewise, simple should not be misunderstood as boring. There’s a happy medium to be struck where your surfers’ attention can be gained and maintained easily. To each user, a website should feel intuitive, as if it were designed expressly with that individual in mind.

2.) Organization

Think of a website like a crime syndicate: the better organized it is, the more successful it will be. The fewer loose ends your website has, the less you have to worry about. The more half-naked girls you put out there, the more hits on your site…okay, forget about that last one.

Rather, remember: every aspect of your website should have a place and a purpose.

3.) Simplicity

Simplicity means more than just functionality of design or what widget goes where on a page. It’s a sense of a streamlined form in your website, and it has to do with everything from click-through to readability (a feature that too many errors, for example, can significantly hamper). Simplicity is both what makes a site elegant and functional. Consider this saying from the Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu (translation by Stephen Mitchell):

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.

This is more than some inscrutable Eastern philosophy. When you fill a website with every clanging color and jangling array of options, there is no emptiness to use, to lead a user where he needs to be. A path is filled with emptiness, but it is exactly what is required to convey someone from point A to point B.

4.) Color

We are visual creatures and we like the shiny. It is, perhaps, how a website called “hampsterdance” once became ubiquitous. Even better, it’s the effective use of color that can make the difference between professional and deplorable.

5.) Content

Well written content is just as important as any other design element on the page. Keywords (the terms that are used to find information on search engines like Google) that are skillfully embedded into the text but do not overwhelm it will draw users to your site, and, once they are there, will be integrated seamlessly to the overall feel of the content. This is how to implement search engine optimization without sacrificing syntax or usability. Well written content will complement the design and will provide a warm welcome to the users who use your site.

A final tip? Seek professional help.

No, not a psychiatrist—although if the thought of building and maintaining a professional-looking website is giving you thoughts of the couch, it’s definitely time to consider handing the reins to a professional web design firm.

There you have it: add a splash of chartreuse and this article would have followed the rules of website design itself. How meta-meta functional!

What is Usability?

“Usability” is often used to describe two related, but distinct, concepts. Usability can define the quality of a system, or it can refer to a process or set of techniques implemented during a design and development project. This second aspect is sometimes described as usability engineering, and is more accurately called user-centered design.

As usability refers to the quality of a system and the process of designing a usable system is “the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use (from the ISO 9241-11).”

Broken down and simplified, ISO 9241-11 outlines that:

1. There are specified users of the system.
2. Those users have a set of specific goals.
3. The system should allow user goals to be met effectively, efficiently and with an outcome that at least meet the goals of the user.
4. The system will be used in a particular context (within a physical location or business process).

A system that is designed to consider all of these aspects is one that is user-centered.

Why is Usability Important?

When a system is highly functional for users, it is extremely beneficial to business.

As users achieve their tasks more easily and efficiently, not only is a feeling of achievement that people get when they use a computer system without frustration fostered that should not be underestimated, but time is saved and productivity is increased. On the other hand, when systems are difficult to use, an individual user cost may be small. Yet taken incrementally in terms of lost sales, customer satisfaction, staff productivity, manufacturing downtime and support requirements, the cumulative price tag may be cripplingly vast. When people are confronted with a difficult-to-use system, they tend to avoid it as much as possible, if not altogether.

How is Usability Attained?

The only way to determine whether a system is usable is to get end users to use it for real tasks.

The main way this is done is through usability testing. In a usability test, users of the system attempt tasks while being observed. The observers don’t tell the usability test participant how to use the system and they don’t answer questions - it is as if the participant were doing the tasks by themselves in real life.

The usability test identifies primary usability problems with a system (enabling them to be fixed); and collects quantitative measures of effectiveness and satisfaction before release.

The key aspects of a usability test are:

1. Participants involved are examples of existing or future users of the system (not managers or business owners).
2. Participants perform realistic tasks on the system.
3. The usability test is set up in a way that is as close to the normal context as possible, with the observers being integrated seamlessly or removed entirely from participant interaction.

What type of usability testing you do depends on the depth of usability issues you want to root out. If you are primarily concerned with major issues, a small and fast team will be able to handle it. A more professional lab setting with a greater number of usability testers will be required for more refinement. It doesn’t take a whole lot of thought to realize that the conclusions reached by some major studies make perfect sense, but it does take a great deal of effort to step out of one’s field of expertise even for great rewards.

Usability testing is not a cure-all. Fixing problems in a design is never as effective or as efficient as preventing design flaws in the first place. Of course, a perfect user-centered design is more of an ideal to aspire to than an achievable reality—but the two, each in concert, may help your business attain user harmony.

All businesses have areas of inefficiency, and could profit from improvement and structural change, from the disgruntled mailroom guy, to manufacturing waste, to accounting error. The Japanese, as especially personified by the management and employees of Mitsubishi, have a philosophy of kaizen: continuous small improvement of anything that can be improved in a business: from cleaning a workspace to converting a paper system to an electronic one.

It is a good philosophy, and it works. Mitsubishi is one of the world’s most successful companies, and other companies have begun to take notice. Hundreds of other businesses sit in on management training sessions at Mitsubishi, in order to get a taste of the kaizen dynamic.

In order for kaizen to work well, however, “improvement” must be quantified. A company of any size can very easily get so caught up in small details that important ones get overlooked, especially when management egos are involved. It was said in the 1990s that Bill Gates’ net worth was so immense, that he could drop a wad of bills totaling $500.00 and it would not be worth his time to bend down and pick it up.

If you see a hundred dollar bill on the ground, of course your first instinct is to pick it up. But what if it costs five hundred dollars to do so? Or five-thousand? The small problems that you want to solve are the ones that are cheap and easy to solve, not the ones that will consume vast amounts of your company’s resources in the process.

To prevent this from happening, it is important to have clear business goals and clear project goals to help ensure everyone knows what sort of expenditure (talent, time, technology) to apply to what specific issues. Identify clear metrics so it is obvious what the Return on Investment (ROI) will be before you start. This will prevent waste and keep your business focused on what it does best.