HCI As A Business Strategy !

Jason Friedlander Peter Hastings HCI 450 May 29, 2011 HCI As A Business Strategy I. INTRODUCTION

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Every business starts with an idea, but the lack of dening and vetting that idea is the difference between a successful business and a failure. The philosophy, strategy and psychology of Human-computer Interaction (HCI), often called User Experience Design (UXD), is a proven process for successfully vetting all different kinds of business decisions. Decisions that range from products to internal tools that help to ensure a path to success, all while avoiding the pitfalls of failure early and often. Apple is one of the many companies that have embraced UXD as a business strategy and has found amazing success. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! I get asked a lot why Apple's customers are so loyal. It's not because they belong to the Church of Mac! That's ridiculous. It's because when you buy our ! products, and three months later you get stuck on something, you quickly gure ! out [how to get past it]. And you think, "Wow, someone over there at Apple actu! ally thought of this!" And then three months later you try to do something you ! hadn't tried before, and it works, and you think "Hey, they thought of that, too." ! And then six months later it happens again. There's almost no product in the !

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world that you have that experience with, but you have it with a Mac. And you ! have it with an iPod.1 HCI can be used as a business strategy that helps to create products like the iPod

that are easy to use, ts the expectation the user, and above all meets business goals. It is the job of the HCI professional within an organization to deliver on these goals. The HCI professional has the difcult task of evaluating the place in which they work to help dene change and future strategy. Above all they must be an evangelist of HCI to the stakeholders to ensure their commitment to the process within the organization, because A company that cannot commit emotionally and intellectually to creating their own future, even in the absence of a strong nancial business case, will almost certainly end up behind their competition.2 II. Building The Competitive Advantage A company can learn many things from HCI to build that competitive advantage. Companies only stand to success from this approach as they work to avoid the hard facts associated with failed projects. Facts that are directly tied to not implementing and HCI workow. Engineers spend up to 50% of their time reworking xable issues. The costs associated with xing an error after the project is completed is 100%

more than xing the same error during production.3

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Jobs, Steve - The Seed of Apples Innovation. Business Week. 10/12/2004 Hamel, Gary. Competing For The Future. Harvard Business School Press, 1994. Charette, R.N. Spectrum, IEEE, Vol.42, Iss.9 (NA), Spet 2005

HCI As A Business Strategy !

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There are six main advantages that HCI can bring internally to an organization that will in turn build competitive advantage and increase ROI in the long run.4 i. Re-dening Business Process HCI experts can take a holistic view of the corporation and their processes and help to rene those practices to better streamline the business and make employees happier and more productive. ii. Create New Products and Services By developing products based on research and the end user a company can gain signicant advantages in quality, innovativeness and time to market. iii. Capturing Unique Information HCI can help to develop ways to take a companies data that it has obtained within its market and use it to their advantage. Marilyn tells the story of Harrahs casino who built an empire off of the data collected from their players club offering. iv. Tying the Product to its Service Infrastructure Find and develop ways to tie common services from across the company to create a unique packaged offering. Managers of business units are often so focused on their own team they dont look outside their bubble, but an HCI focused employee can roam and should roam. They should see what Team A is doing and what Team X has done and create new business opportunities for the company. v. Managing Corporate Knowledge More Efciently Working with existing company interfaces to tie them together seamlessly with existing processes. Companies often use many different products developed by

Tremaine, Marilyn. UXD & Competitive Advantage Lecture. Rutgers University. 2010

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many different software companies and it is the job of the HCI professional to make that a more streamlined and seamless integration. vi. Supporting Collaboration Creating process efciency amongst subunits within the company for a seamless integration of work. Which is ever more present as workers start working more and more from home and their mobile devices.5 III. Sell Your Way In HCI professionals may nd it very hard to get stakeholders within a company to see the value of this type of approach. The impact of a UX team is often centered around employee satisfaction and workow efciencies, which are tackled in small steps and overall hard to quantify. Many times corporations and their stakeholders will argue that HCI within their organization has little to no ROI. While that may be true on face value, meaning that internal HCI teams cant charge clients for their work, when a study was conducted by ClareMarie Karat she showed that by with every dollar invested on HCI practices within her organization there was a 2 dollar return on that investment in the long run. A deeper look into that study revealed the ROI to be even larger.6 An effective way for user experience teams to play bigger roles in an organization is to create their own projects like Karat did. They should nd issues that are around signicant user or business problems and generate consistent results. They can show their

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Tremaine, Marilyn. UXD & Competitive Advantage Lecture. Rutgers University. 2010 Bias, Randolph G and Mayhew, Deborah J. Cost-Justifying Usability An Update for an

Internet Age. Morgan Kaufman Publishers. 2005.

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understanding of nancial issues to better follow the ROI process and develop a business case for their projects, which in-turn solve user experience issues and business goals.7 IV. Sell Your Way Out Just like an internal focused HCI professional, client focused ones must sell the value of HCI to their companies clients. Customers must come to understand the ROI to them if a vendor company takes a step back with each request and vettes all aspects of the job. This needs to be done with varying scales based on the complexity of the job and the timeframe allotted. Clients are not going to be happy with a vendor asking them to change delivery dates so that they can throughly examine all the requirements, but they will be happy if a vendor can make educated decisions based on doing the right evaluations for each specic job to get the best possible end product. A product that most importantly meets the end users needs. Marilyn Tremaine says, There are tangible business results to an approach that puts users at the center of design. She also denes areas in which a customer focused HCI team can market their approach and value. i. Preach To Your Clients An HCI professional should be in constant contact with clients and supply them with information on both the successes and failures. ii. Make Clients Aware Of The Value Your Group Provides

Herman, Jeff. A Process for Creating the Business Case for User Experience Projects.

CHI EA '04 CHI '04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems

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This can be accomplished by going back and looking at the end product versus the initial set of requirements. HCI professionals can present to the client cost savings and changes based on adding and revising the requirements based on the user. iii. Provide Great Work The client must always see value in what your group brings to the table and whether your group failed to spot a change that needed to be made or successfully launched a product the same level of professionalism must always be put forth. Clients will respect and value decisions if you are aware of mistakes. This is why it is important to reward failure.8 V. Is Your Company Ready For UX? Before any of the above happens you need to be make sure that your company is ready to tackle a UXD approach into its current workow. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! The Innovation Value Institute at the National University Ireland Maynooth ! is currently developing a UX Capability Maturity Framework (CMF) which ! is a an attempt to formalize the assessment of a businesses capability to ! engage in UXD across the following three dimensions: 1. User-centric Processes 2. Stafng and Training 3. Organizational Alignment 4. Management Commitment

Tremaine, Marilyn. UXD & Competitive Advantage Lecture. Rutgers University. 2010

HCI As A Business Strategy ! 5. Strategy and Visioning9

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The following chart helps to dene the readiness of a corporation and can be used to determine if the company is in the right position to take on the UXD process into its organization.

Sward, David and Macarthur, Gavin. Making User Experience a Business Strategy.CHI

'09 Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems. 2009

HCI As A Business Strategy ! VI. Say No. Are You Crazy?

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Service companies live and die by their salesforce and bringing in that next big job, and a good HCI professional within that organization can protect their salesforce by building up the companies reputation of success and that starts with saying no. Often clients will approach a vendor company with an idea and a budget. The vendors initial reaction is WOW! This is our next big job! when it really should be Is this the right direction for our client? Taking a step back from the impact of the revenue of this one job and applying HCI principles to evaluate the request may be the better approach. A company should always observe a best-practice strategy where they can look at the requirements set forth by their customer and determine whether it should be a general implementation, customer-specic implementation or a requirement at all.10 Many companies will nd that this type of approach will not only give them a better understanding of the task at hand, but those few times a company may have to say no and steer the client in a better direction may actually help to build up that businesses reputation and save their client from a colossal failure and waste of money. VII.Continuing ROI Once a company has gotten a client to buy in on the process the real work begins. It is going to be a difcult task of educating and managing the client on the right and wrong way to work all while building ROI for your company long after a specic job is complete. This is where customer experience management comes into play. Customer

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Bias, Randolph G and Mayhew, Deborah J. Cost-Justifying Usability An Update for an

Internet Age. Morgan Kaufman Publishers. 2005.

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Experience Management is the practice of HCI as it directly relates to building and maintaining clients for your business. David Strom denes 5 key benets from practicing customer experience management during and after a projects life cycle to build future ROI within your company and save on costs today. Four of those points as they relate to this paper are: i. Reduce at-risk revenue. Recover potentially lost customers ! By following up with customers and keeping them in the loop companies

can use simple research methods derived from HCI such as surveys to determine how successful they have been servicing their clients and then take action in the areas they are weak if needed. ii. Engage existing customers as a sustainable engine for growth ! Use your best customers to market for you. Reward them for loyalty and

recommendations. iii. Reduce the costs of new customer acquisition ! When you generate buzz with one client they are often going to recom-

mend you to another and your company didnt have to spend any marketing dollars to make that happen. It was all developed by keeping up a good working relationship with your current client base. iv. Engage employees. Reduce staff turnover and cost of hiring ! Keeping employees engaged is one of the best ways to increase ROI and

develop new business avenues, but also reaching out to your employees the same

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way you do to your customers allows you to change direction of the ship before you hit a storm. Happy employees make for extremely happy clients.11 VIII.ROI Through Innovation the Google Way Google attempts to spark innovation through its employees. They make sure that they dedicate at least 10% of individuals time, preferably 20% to innovation. The Google model gives employees free time to work on a project of their choice. Googles founders understand that innovation does not happen in a vacuum without time and attention. The culture of innovation must be created and cultivated. The Google model is based on the principles of HCI and ROI. As employees work on these projects they are constantly nding new ways to innovate the Google product or develop new avenues of business. Google makes sure to reward their employees for failures as well as successes because they understand that without failure there will never be that next great idea. IX. CONCLUSION As technology becomes increasing standardized, IT organizations that provide compelling user experiences by understanding how to support employees rapidly changing work practices will create a competitive advantage and impact their companies bottom lines.12

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Strom, David. Top 5 ROI benets of Customer Experience Management.

www.readwriteweb.com. 5/25/2011
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Sward, David. Gaining a Competitive Advantage Through User Experience Design.

www.intel.com/IT White Paper. 2006

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The previous quote is from a white paper published by Intel. Intel is a company much like Apple that has derived great success from practicing the principles of HCI both internally and to their customer facing units. They talk about the benets of knowing what their end user wants and needs and tying those directly back to business objectives. A company can achieve success by adopting HCI think into their current business strategy. It is not the sole answer but it is a major part of what successful businesses will practice in the future. As laid out by Sward and Macarthur this can be achieved though linking HCI to the bottom line of the rm, implementing a UXD program and managing the companies capability.13

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Sward, David and Macarthur, Gavin. Making User Experience a Business

Strategy.CHI '09 Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems. 2009

HCI As A Business Strategy ! Work Cited

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1. Jobs, Steve - The Seed of Apples Innovation. Business Week. 10/12/2004 2. Hamel, Gary. Competing For The Future. Harvard Business School Press, 1994. 3. Charette, R.N. Spectrum, IEEE, Vol.42, Iss.9 (NA), Spet 2005 4. Tremaine, Marilyn. UXD & Competitive Advantage Lecture. Rutgers University. 2010 5. Bias, Randolph G and Mayhew, Deborah J. Cost-Justifying Usability An Update for an Internet Age. Morgan Kaufman Publishers. 2005. 6. Herman, Jeff. A Process for Creating the Business Case for User Experience Projects. CHI EA '04 CHI '04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems 7. Strom, David. Top 5 ROI benets of Customer Experience Management. 8. Sward, David. Gaining a Competitive Advantage Through User Experience Design. www.intel.com/IT White Paper. 2006 9. Sward, David and Macarthur, Gavin. Making User Experience a Business Strategy.CHI '09 Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems. 2009