Strategic Usability: A Toolkit of Methods for Success
Usability testing is only the beginning of a strategically effective usability program. A strategic usability program employing multiple usability methods can improve marketing success and inform corporate strategy in many ways, including:
- Collecting data to support marketing messages—comparative usability studies of your product and its competitors, or of several competitors’ products, produce data you can use in competitive analyses, sales training, and product planning
- Building relationships—study participants become better customers, prospective customers recognize the value of usability programs, and marketing collateral can feature usability
- Facilitating change management—you can choose usability research participants whose buy-in you need to promote a new product or system (both internal users and customers or prospective customers)
- Usability as ammunition for corporate strategy—many large and small firms, from Intel to 50-person start-ups, employ usability research to guide their long-term strategic planning
This full-day workshop is based in part on survey data collected from usability practitioners, in which we asked what usability methods were most successful, and why. In addition, Tec-Ed has conducted hundreds of usability studies using all the methods discussed in this workshop; we have built an extensive compilation of when, why, and how to use—and not to use—each method.
The workshop begins with descriptions of the primary usability methods:
- Laboratory testing
- Contextual inquiry
- Ethnographic interviews
- Usability focus groups
- Heuristic evaluation
We’ll discuss the characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses of each method, giving examples and case histories. We’ll talk about the schedules, budgets, and resources each method requires.
The workshop includes extensive interactive, hands-on activities. The attendees form research teams, receive problem scenarios, and design usability studies to explore the issues and collect appropriate data. The teams present their study designs to the group; their colleagues and the facilitator give feedback.
The workshop concludes with a discussion of how to combine the methods from the usability toolkit into an integrated, multiple-method usability program.
A half-day seminar of this training content is available. For more information about Tec-Ed’s Strategic Usability training, please contact Barbra Wells at barbra@teced.com.
