MNteractive.com

The description of tonight’s event can be found over at UPA-MN A Case Study for Strategic Usability Success. This was a practice round for Jen Bohmbach, Lyle Kantrovich, and Susan Dray - they’ll be presenting this a the UPA Conference in Montreal laster this month. If you’re going to Montreal, introduce yourself to them.

In the improv world, the goal is to ‘get out of your head’ - to silence the voice of your internal editor and make something interesting. In describing the redesign of Cargill.com, Lyle showed that companies have an ‘internal editor’ and if they can ‘get out of their head’, perhaps, just perhaps they can see their website through the eyes of their customers.

For this project Lyle hired separate design and usability vendors. The design vendor went through a Request for Proposal process, the usability vendor did not. Asked about this discrepancy, he responded, “the RFP process seemed a little heavy-handed.” Though I don’t agree with it, I can appreciate the objective third-party attitude for separating design and usability. In my experience, the separation indefinitely paints the usability evaluator as the “bad cop” constantly telling the design team what they’ve done wrong with no power to change it directly. Designers curious about how their work is being received by customers will want more direct contact with the customers. Designers that don’t care about the customers, see usability evaluation as a hassle. I don’t see either side interested in a third party handling the usability. In either case, I think there’s something to be said for consistency - either go through the RFP process to select a vendor or don’t.

I say this all before Susan Dray did a fantastic job describing how she and David Siegel avoided being the “bad cop”.

• Step 1: Continually ask yourself, “How can we provide value?”, from a strategic standpoint.
• Step 2: Deep and early collaboration with both the client and other vendors.

Another key Susan brought up, when there’s brought-to-a-stand-still conflict, the problem is usually lack of information. If two solutions to a problem are exclusive and equally valid, then as Susan says, “a little data goes a long way.” I’m a big fan of finding new information to resolve a conflict. In the end, the final solution is rarely either of the initial options.

In the end, this presentation was about 3 organizations working together successfully to solve a big problem. Was it all sunshine and lollypops? No. Did everyone work on making it work, understanding they’re all there for a reason? Yes and that seems to be the bigger lesson here.

Years ago, I reviewed one of Marc Rettig’s many illuminating presentations. In the middle of this particular one, he threw in landscape painting with the caption:

“I just like this picture.”

. I remember quite a few pictures and photos in his presentations and it showed me early that PowerPoint is better as an companion to the speakers conversation than speaker’s notes. The presentation tonight could have used some more pictures and fewer bullet points.

Oh yeah, and DeeDee, you rock.