Progressive Notes

I don't drink KoolAid.
Product Innovation Labs

Someone's PE said: My team's contribution to shareholders is about M$500, which is more than some product lines.

Arnie Lund

Your elevator talk: Shared business cases and goals; defining UX brand; integration into processes; improving UX effectiveness and efficiency.
About 10 years ago, there was the productivity paradigm in American industry where investment in IT resources did not result in efficiency/productivity gains. At that time, you'd sell to closing the productivity gap. What can we sell to now?
NPV: You can drive NPV by picking high-value projects and participating when you can maximize your value.
What matters to your organization?: innovation, business results?
Sweet spot: the intersection of business, user, and technology.
Agents and TCO? Training and TCO? (Can we use TAM (technology adoption model)?)
What is a UX bug?

POV: "What is our 3-minute pitch?"
We don't talk in terms of metrics, but in terms of a client's Achilles' heels and how we can help.
Focus on the story; leave the proof to the articles in Bias/Mayhew's book.
Business Week - it is now "in" to innovate. (Cover text: innovation champions.)
Awards are given for product design (i.e., ID), but not for usability. Why is that?
Learn the language of business: key business objectives; state UX value in these terms; present story in key business locations, events, publications; will take 3-7 years.

Dollars as metric.
Why we have a problem: business doesn't' know they need us; developers think their humanity enables them design intuitive products.
Why is it worse with the web: we have less certainty about who our users are; traditional development Release 1 methodology doesn't succeed on the web.
Two joys: usability has a robust ROI; ROI works for lots of people.
Two confounds: benefits are not solely attributable to usability; it is difficult to project ROI.
Perhaps we need to be less encumbered by the need for empirical facts when describing and selling ourselves.
What if we just had a single number to describe usability, so we could say, "That product's usability is a 6 and it needs to be a 7."

I spend a lot of my time managing up.
Anecdotes carry weight; provide leaders with stories to tell
Change the corporate culture: arrogant to humble; closed-minded to curious.
Measure what you want people to get better at.
Great innovations do not come from metrics.
Balance conceptual simplicity with precision: Self-reported success is not very reliable; ease of use has a ceiling. (simplicity ref: Sauro and Kindlund, (2004) Simple Usability Measure, was this in UPA 2005?)
Focus on the GM/CEO, not the development managers.
Use historical data to make business predictions: not precise, but useful.

Why ignore usability? Perceived as adding risk, e.g., time, cost; unfamiliarity with usability; no established process; not something I have been asked to do; intangible, every user wants something different.
Barriers: increased cost; increased development time; increased risk.
Motivators: RFP mentions ease of use, so what's the least we can do to address this?; Project has usability problems; Serious usability convert; understanding that usability is important for success.
Factors: effective, efficient, satisfied, reduced business risk.
What does the gate keeper value? Increased revenue, decreased costs, reduced risk of project/product failure, none of these?
We need to come up with pitches that are tailored to specific roles, not generic pitches.