For a little background, I work for a firm that develops web-based enterprise social media platforms. We have a diverse clientele and our mantra is that we bring our clients closer to their clients. Basically, usability should be a very, very important consideration for us throughout the product lifecycle.
However, my company employs no IA’s (while we do have very knowledgeable product managers and designers) or in-house usability analysts. We haven’t sent any of our products off for a proper user experience testing or usability analysis. Since I have a bit of background in IA/Usability, I’m taking it upon myself to change this, because I see Usability as saving us money in many ways: decreased QA iterations, building our business knowledge for future product development, increased sales confidence, etc.
The problem, though, is that nobody seems very interested. Management is concerned about the overhead incurred by changing our approach to development; many developers don’t really care much about usability anyways, since it won’t change much for them; sales just doesn’t know much about it to begin with.
How should I approach my managers/leadership and convince them to start considering usability an important part of our development and sales process? Thanks in advance!
Managers and sales people, especially in this climate, have exactly one thing on their mind: how to make the most amount of money with the least amount of effort.
You will need hard sales or financial numbers to show real ROI to your execs. Otherwise, all of the talking in the world isn’t going to move them.
Once you have management on board, which is a huge hurdle in itself, then development will follow.