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Advocating User-Centred Design to Your Company?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the 5-minutes-of-your-time-sir dept.

Bertie asks: "I'm a UI designer at a small company who has recently found himself sidelined on certain projects. It seems that they've been sold without enough consideration given to providing a good user experience, because the deals were done on the cheap. From my point of view, providing a satisfying user experience is not an optional luxury, it should underpin every other aspect of the project. If you were me, and you had a couple of hours to promote the importance of what you do to various people — execs, sales, developers, project managers, and the like — how would you use the time?"

3 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Show Them the Money by Dunx · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In this situation, saying your company should spend money to do something because it is the Right Thing is not going to work.

    Instead, show them how a poorly considered UI is going to cost the company money, eg through more support calls, or through lost sales because the tool is unusable.

    If you can't think of ways in which spending money on UI design is going to get money back, then you will not be able to justify the work to your employers.

    And if push comes to shove, you can always take your ideas to a competitor.

    --
    Dunx
    Converting caffeine into code since 1982
  2. Users? Who are they? by Cassini2 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Speaking as an engineering professional, user's are what ultimately make or break a project. They determine if it will succeed or fail.

    Often you can ship a project without user approval. The people that will use the program/design/machine will not see the results of your labour until it is installed and operational at the customers site. As such, users do not have much impact on many of the initial stages of the project.

    People forget that users are the ones that actually use your project. If they raise hell, or if they refuse to use your new technology, then the project is often left unfinished. The company will eventually see the project as a failure. Often the vendor is blamed. It can then be really hard to ever sell another program to that company again.

    Users make or break an engineering project. Users determine if you will ever sell a second piece of software to a company again.

  3. Make them happy by AndroidCat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Give them a command line interface. If they complain, say "Ooooo! Look who wants to be Mister Fancy and Expensive!"

    --
    One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.