[Sigia-l] Usability Profession Increasingly Under Scrutiny?

[Mitchell Gass]

At 07:16 AM 1/13/2004, Lord, Ralph wrote:
> > ...over 60% of IT projects fail...
>...And of those projects that failed, "usability" could have prevented 
>about 0.087% of them...

Is this one kind of failure you're thinking of?

"The Yankee Group...found that 30 percent of all recently introduced home 
networking products sold today were returned because the consumer could not 
get them to work."

At a very large firm I worked for, a series of diagnostic usability tests 
allowed us to improve the success rate for initial installation of a home 
networking router from less than 25% to over 90%. The total cost for the 
testing and changes was in the tens of thousands of dollars; the result 
could easily have saved millions of dollars in lost sales and support costs.

The quote, by the way, is from coverage of a speech at this week's Consumer 
Electronics Show by the chief executive of Philips:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=568&ncid=749&e=2&u=/nm/20040110/bs_nm/tech_philips_dc 


Some other excerpts:

"The first guiding principle should be that the consumer always comes 
first. If a product requires a manual, maybe it's too complex."

"Overall, I think we need to employ more anthropologists and fewer 
technologists."

Mitchell Gass
uLab | PDA: Learning from Users | Designing with Users
Berkeley, CA 94707 USA
+1 510 525-6864 voice
+1 510 525-4246 fax
http://www.participatorydesign.com/