Search

Usability research is dramatically affecting product design in the 21st century. Five user experience and research managers from cutting-edge Silicon Valley companies discuss the strategic relationship between user research and product design, organizational processes that succeed in helping user research and user experience design improve products, and what's different about user research and user experience design for Internet companies and Web sites.

This SIG is sponsored by the CHI 2006 and CHI 2007 Usability Community chairs to collect feedback and discuss how CHI can best serve the Usability Community, both at the annual conference and in other activities. If you're a practitioner or a researcher interested in usability, please join us and contribute your ideas!.

In this panel we will present the opinions and experiences of a set of experts who have worked with large-market customers, also known as enterprise customers, in a usability context. We will provide a brief overview of the differences in usability engineering with large-market customers compared to business-to-consumer or small to mid-market customers. We will then present, in an interview format, the opinions of our panelists on a set of questions challenging the 'usability' nature of working with this set of stakeholders.

The practice of usability and user-centered design must integrate with many other activities in the product development lifecycle. This integration requires political savvy, knowledge of a wide variety of methods, flexibility in using methods, inspiration, and innovation. The speakers and their colleagues have met these requirements and describe their experience fitting various methods into design and development efforts. This forum highlights their successes and setbacks.

The adoption of user experience methods within companies has followed a similar evolution over the past two decades. Typically organizations originally institute formative lab-based evaluations, and then add field studies and other user experience methods to their repertoire. This evolution typically occurs because the organization recognizes the need for more data on customer profiles, feature requirements, and task flows, along with the ability to iterate quickly among various design ideas and directions. These methods that fall outside of the categories of formative usability evaluations and field studies are addressed in this paper. Although there are a wide variety of methods within this 'alternative' category, a few representative samples will be discussed in more detail here. In actuality, these methods are not 'alternatives,' rather, they are additions to the toolkit of user experience methods that should be used in conjunction with formative usability studies and field studies.

This paper describes the organizational approaches and usability methodologies considered by HCI professionals to increase the strategic impact of usability research within companies. We collected the data from 134 HCI professionals at three conferences: CHI 98, CHI 99, and the Usability Professionals' Association 1999 conference. The results are the first steps towards a toolkit for the usability community that can help HCI practitioners learn from the experiences of others in similar situations.