Sep 21 - Nielsen, Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 5-8 (Alertbox)

Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 5-8

Summary: An organization that reaches the managed usability stage still has far to go to reach usability nirvana. Attaining these higher maturity levels requires many years of effort.

Stage 5: Managed Usability

At this stage, we can finally say usability has "made it" in a company. At stage 4, bits of usability budgets are scattered around the organization. However, these budgets can be canceled without notice, resigning the staff to work on non-usability areas of their projects.
At stage 5, there's an official usability group, led by a usability manager who has the charter to "own" usability. Typically, the group starts with only a few members, but tends to grow and acquire dedicated usability lab space as the company increases its user testing.
Stage 5 resembles stage 4 in the choice of usability methods: the focus is still on user testing, which mainly occurs too late in the development lifecycle. The primary difference here is that studies are conducted more consistently because the usability group refines its methodology as members learn from each other.
The group can also maintain a usability reports archive to compile past findings. Doing so enhances understanding of the company's users, which culminates in company-specific design guidelines. Such cross-study insights are an early move toward the systematic usability processes that characterize stage 6 of corporate usability maturity.
Finally, stage 5 is the first stage at which the company has a person -- the usability manager -- whose job it is to think about usability across the organization and across design projects. If usability managers spend all their time fixing individual design mistakes, they've failed their most important task: increasing organizational maturity and leveraging existing usability staff for more strategic purposes.
The problem is that the usability budget is too squeezed at stage 5 to implement all the recommended usability activities for all projects. Instead, the usability manager must select particularly promising projects.

Stage 6: Systematic Usability Process

The company has recognized the need for an actual user-centered design process, with multiple activities and milestones. On important projects, the team conducts early user research before they do any design. Typically, the company also has a user interface design standard or a centralized definition of preferred design patterns.
Further, in stage 6, the company likely has a process in place for tracking user experience quality throughout design projects and across releases. Upper management monitors these quality indicators just like they do other business indicators, and projects with sick designs are cured before they reach customers.
Finally, iterative design is more common at this stage because the company realizes that it can't achieve the best interface quality in one round of usability fixes. Much better results come from gradually refining a series of designs -- from early paper prototypes to the final implementation -- and testing them at each step.
While still not lavish, the usability budget at stage 6 is large enough that key projects receive sufficient resources to conduct a range of user research. The very fact that projects are prioritized according to the business value of their user experience is yet another sign of this maturity level. Finally, even projects that don't get a lot of usability resources go through at least some form of usability review before they're approved for release.

Stage 7: Integrated User-Centered Design

At stage 6, the company starts doing field studies. At stage 7, this form of very early user research becomes more prominent. Each development lifecycle step at maturity level 7 is infused with user data, including the project definition itself and the requirements phase.
Beyond simply estimating user experience quality -- which is typical of stage 6 -- the company often tracks quality at stage 7 through quantitative usability metrics. Furthermore, each project has defined usability goals that these measurements must surpass for the design to be greenlighted for release.

Stage 8: User-Driven Corporation

At stage 8, user data doesn't just define individual projects, it determines what types of projects the company should fund. That is, the company employs user research to determine its overall direction and priorities. Also, the concept of total user experience is extended beyond the screen to other forms of customer interactions with the company.
The main difference between stages 7 and 8 is one of degree. The company uses many of the same usability methods, but at this ultimate maturity level, those methods affect corporate strategy and activities beyond interface design.
While numerous management books advocate customer input into corporate decision-making, it's rare to find companies that use real behaviorally observed user data for this purpose. Instead, most make do with surveys or other less-valid indicators of what customers say, as opposed to what they do. To study customer's actual behavior, methods from the usability toolkit are required.

Source:
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, May 1, 2006:
Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 5-8
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/process_maturity.html
Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 5-8 (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)