Who is the user anyway?

Scenario: A New Customer, new domain and a new challenge. We prepare ourself for the race, send in our best Business Analysts for system study, impress the customer with a thick Biz requiremen document, sign off and start development. We get agile, do great programming, test the product, roll it out….create a quite lof of buzz about the rollout, the achievements, the raves from the customer and so on…..

Few days …… ticks off peacefully….

Customer comes calling back….He comes back with this new but increasingly frequent complaint:

" I know we did a great work. But somehow the end users dont seem to get it. The product usage rate has fallen down drammatically compared to our previous release. They dont seem to get all the new useful features that we provided. We are really trying to know if you guys can help us"

Ahem…….So whats the solution here…

USABILITY? Yes of course thats the missing image from the BIG Picture.

Pls remember these phrases:

• 'Your Customer is not the end user.'
• 'Ask for a specialist to understand the users better'
• 'Ask for someone to translate users needs and pain points'
• ' Test with the users(real end users), early and often'

So what if the dev team is not equipped to face this situation. There are specialists to address this scenario. They are called Usability Consultants/Practitioners/Engineers. What can they do?

1. They can understand users better. - With special techniques like user research, Contextual Inquiry, focused groups

2. They can make an EASY to USE application - They design applications for the user in context. Driven by strong processes and guidelines

3. They can make sure that the final application is well accepted by the user groups - They test the application for Usability. There are a variety of methods - Qualitative and Quantitative to get the real data to show how the application fared in the user community

So next time you hear about Usability do not panic. Just find the right set of people.