Let us say, just for grins, that a developer in your organization had a sudden desire to test out a design she is working on. She’s had some concern the interface she’s planning may be difficult for the target audience. How fast could she get results? A day? A week? A month?

This was a question that ran through my mind last week as a potential client was talking to me about having us come in and train their development teams. They have an IT department of 300 folks, with approximately 30 analysts and others who are directly responsible for user interfaces. It’s become a management mandate to make sure that all future application development, whether for internal folks, customers, or vendors, go through “usability” .

I’m pretty sure they wanted me to tell them what the classes would be and when we could schedule them. But, unfortunately, I snuck in a question: Do you have the administrative infrastructure to support usability research in place? It turns out that, while they’ve done some testing in the past, they don’t really have any infrastructure to make usability research happen effectively.

To make usability research happen, users need to be identified, recruited, and scheduled. Tasks need to be designed. Prototypes need producing. Rooms need scheduling. Tests need facilitating. Notes need compiling. Results need disseminating and analyzing. All of this takes time, resources, and skills.

In our experience, the companies that see the most benefit from usability research training are the ones that have thought about all these things in advance and put the infrastructure into place to make it happen. It doesn’t have to be difficult or onerous — it can often be done with a part-time administrator to start. We’ve had a lot of success helping various clients put this into place without much effort.

Even though it’s not difficult to get the usability infrastructure into place, the organization needs to do it before training the developers on the techniques, to ensure they can hit the ground running as soon as they exit the class. It works even more effectively if you run a pilot project or two, so the training happens within the context of the organization’s recent experience with the techniques.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 1st, 2005 at 11:15 am and is filed under Usability Toolbox . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.