Previous Table of Contents Next


2.1. STRUCTURE FOR USER INVOLVEMENT

At the beginning of a firefighting or fire-prevention usability engineering effort for the redevelopment of a set of legacy systems, it is essential to secure user involvement to the degree that the corporate culture, the project plan, and the budget permit. A two-tiered structure for user involvement has worked well on a number of in-house application development projects. A User Committee represents the users of the application, while a Usability Steering Committee represents senior user management and other senior management involved in the project.

A User Committee consists of three to six representative users who are seconded to the committee full time or part time for the duration of the project. The mandate of the User Committee is to

  Provide detailed information during the usability analysis phase and review the results of the analysis.
  Provide feedback on all aspects of the user interface design (particularly during the usability design phase) and review results from prototyping sessions and recommend priorities for improvement.
  Review results from field trials and acceptance tests during the usability evaluation phase and recommend priorities for improvement.
  Review and approve all project usability work and deliverables before they are submitted to the Usability Steering Committee for review and approval.

It is important that the User Committee is staffed with users who possess the following qualifications:

  Users should be experienced staff members, because experience is essential to describe current user tasks and malfunctions (see Section 3.4).
  Users should be representative of a diverse user population to the degree possible.
  Users should be generalists with a wide range of task experience so that they can contribute their knowledge to a larger number of tasks (specialists are consulted if necessary).
  Users should be part of a network of colleagues from whom they can obtain specialist knowledge or reviews.
  Users should be outspoken.
  Some users should have had supervisory experience in order to address supervisory issues, e.g., review and approve issues.
  Some users should be experienced in training new employees on the job, because such users know the most frequent sources of errors and those parts of the job and the application that are the most difficult for a new employee to learn. These areas will require special attention during the user interface design phase of the project.

The role of the User Committee is to work jointly with the usability engineers on all aspects of the usability work. The users are effectively co-designers. Even though such a small number of users is a rather narrow representation of a large user community, a small number of users is important for the group work throughout the usability engineering effort (user interface design by large committee is not effective). A small number of users is usually all that managers are willing and able to provide (when the users are co-designing instead of doing their regular job, someone has to fill in for them). The intensity of work on a User Committee tends to cycle from several days or weeks of continuous effort to periods of little or no activity. Typically, staff members serving on a User Committee are seconded to the project for 2 to 5 days every week, depending on the amount and the nature of the work to be done.

In addition, real or surrogate users are involved in iterative prototyping and usability testing. These users must represent the larger user community in terms of regional differences, specialist knowledge and requirements, and new employees or transfer employees.

A Usability Steering Committee consists of the usability engineering project manager (usually without decision-making and voting power), three to five senior managers from the business area affected by the project, as well as senior managers from the training, policies and procedures, and information technology departments. The Steering Committee meets as required, approximately every 2 weeks. The mandate of the Steering Committee is to:

  Review and approve all usability deliverables.
  Review and approve designs before they become part of a deliverable. In particular, the Steering Committee chooses one of the proposed user interface design alternatives in situations where a business issue masquerades as a user interface issue (see Section 4.3.2).
  Resolve issues requiring senior management approval. Typical examples are policy issues, modifications to business processes, and changes in organizational responsibility and accountability.
  Make decisions on project direction. These are directly associated with the project and business objectives. Typical examples are decisions on usability and usefulness of system functions, determining appropriate levels of involvement of participants in decision making beyond the Usability Steering Committee, and assessing the cost and benefit of alternative designs.

It is possible that the views and recommendations of the User Committee do not agree with the views and recommendations of the Usability Steering Committee. In that case, the views and recommendations of the Usability Steering Committee prevail. The usability project manager may sometimes find him- or herself in the role of a mediator between the two committees, but must respect the authority of the Steering Committee at all times. This often requires considerable diplomatic skill.

The usability project manager must be a member of the overall Project Management Committee, which consists of the managers of the teams involved, e.g., the software development team, the database team, the network team, etc. Both the Usability Steering Committee and the Project Management Committee report to the Project Steering Committee, which is comprised of senior executives from the business area affected by or involved in the project.

The User Committee and the Usability Steering Committee are required for both fire prevention and firefighting assignments. However, in a firefighting assignment, it may not be possible to establish the committees formally. In this case, the usability project manager must secure the full time or at least part time involvement of two to three subject matter experts (i.e., users with a wide range of task experience and some supervisory experience) to function as a User Committee. The usability project manager must also identify key senior managers who, as a group, function as a Usability Steering Committee. Without this kind of minimal user and management support, a firefighting usability assignment is unlikely to succeed.


Previous Table of Contents Next