A Systems Approach to Usability

Web-developers!

Tired of watching your profit margin disappear as you struggle to fix usability problems?

Want to improve your hit rate at pitches?

Take a systems approach to usability

Look at ways of improving your internal processes in order to improve the service you deliver.

How many of the following can you confidently say you have under control? Which methodologies are you using? Are you, or could you become, "best of breed"?

Requirements gathering to identify user needs as well as client needs
Adherence to design best practice for usability and accessibility
Design validation through prototyping and participatory design
Focusing on real users in quality assurance and testing procedures
Communicating usability issues throughout the development team and becoming a learning organisation

Commission a Usability Capability Audit from the experts

We have undertaken audit work for a wide range of clients and are pleased to be able to announce our new Usability Capability Audit. The results may surprise you. We will identify the parts of your design and development processes where usability receives the emphasis it deserves and those where actions can be taken to make your products more usable and, therefore, useful for your clients.

The audit is structured as five, typically half-day, sessions - three off-site and two on-site with your own staff.

Session One: review of one or more client sites to assess strengths and weaknesses
Session Two: review of project documentation as evidence of good practices
Session Three: "what is usability" workshop with development team
Session Four: report writing
Session Five: debrief on audit findings

The full audit report will typically cost you less than the amount you could save on your next project alone.

Neil Sandford ran one of this country’s first wave of multimedia production companies through the 1980s and received Design Council recognition as an ergonomics consultant in the IT field in 1989.

Dianne Murray is a psychologist with twenty years of experience in human-computer interaction. She is currently editor of Elsevier Science’s journal "Interacting With Computers"

See also: Usability - why Putting People Before Computers?