How would you pitch Usability to your manager?

Question

Hey Everyone,

For a little background, I work for a firm that develops web-based enterprise social media platforms. We have a diverse clientele and our mantra is that we bring our clients closer to their clients. Basically, usability should be a very, very important consideration for us throughout the product lifecycle.

However, my company employs no IA's (while we do have very knowledgeable product managers and designers) or in-house usability analysts. We haven't sent any of our products off for a proper user experience testing or usability analysis. Since I have a bit of background in IA/Usability, I'm taking it upon myself to change this, because I see Usability as saving us money in many ways: decreased QA iterations, building our business knowledge for future product development, increased sales confidence, etc.

The problem, though, is that nobody seems very interested. Management is concerned about the overhead incurred by changing our approach to development; many developers don't really care much about usability anyways, since it won't change much for them; sales just doesn't know much about it to begin with.

How should I approach my managers/leadership and convince them to start considering usability an important part of our development and sales process? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I guess you can just point at Apple - usability and design is practically their business model, and it sure is efficient!

Answer 2

Managers and sales people, especially in this climate, have exactly one thing on their mind: how to make the most amount of money with the least amount of effort.

You will need hard sales or financial numbers to show real ROI to your execs. Otherwise, all of the talking in the world isn't going to move them.

Once you have management on board, which is a huge hurdle in itself, then development will follow.

Answer 3

Chris is right, you need to prove ROI. Human Factors International has some ROI calculators that may be helpful.

Also, check out the book "Institutionalization of Usability". You can preview it here.

Answer 4

I have been a UX/Usability/IA (whatever you want to call it) practicioner for many years. One of the better articles on the subject is right here (Selling UX By Daniel Szuc on UXMatters) It covers most of the obstacles and offers great insight into the age-old problem of selling something that people just do not know they actually need. The main point I think: your company, organization, group, etc. have to be ready to integrate the customer voice into the design process. It is sometimes a huge shift that some people cannot fathom. Others have been doing for years without knowing it. Keep in mind: It is almost impossible to sell usability or UX to companies that ignore or sometimes even denigrate users because they complain about their products. Marketing people are usually the most aware of the power of the customer voice. You might to get them on your side first. At first, don't even mention methods or processes. Mention potential, measurable, business results.