[Sigia-l] Internal usability/UE teams

[Donna Timara]

Ted Han <notheory at gmail.com> wrote:
> (that said, this is the sort of (vague) question for which one should
> not expect answers which are straightforward, unequivocal, or  even
> useful)

It is vague problem. I am not sure how will you calculate number of
toilet seats unless you know if you are talking about Regan Building,
MOMA, or the 12 story apartment building that I own in Boston?

Probably you may look at rephrasing your questions. Vague questions
like this can't get you anywhere.

Here's one statistical analysis that you can use to extend your research,

You can consider looking at different Projects within your firm and
see how much they are spending (money, time, opportunity). Classify
everything in three buckets -- requirement engineering, UCD, and
engineering. Fill this matrix with percentage spent on project life
cycles.

If you repeat this with all the projects you will get average for UCD
practices across different projects. This average will be insufficient
to make any point, so you have to also mention standard deviation.
More the std. dev. more is the variance in your project consumption of
UCD.

This is one way you can estimate how many head count you plan for any
project. There is qualitative argument that you have to look at as
well – Do you need to increase the headcounts to lower down project
duration? Or you need to make improvement within quality benchmarks?
And then there's whole lot of argument about law of diminishing
returns that applies with every project… I will leave rest up to you.

There is one good article at ACM, which you must read --
The state of user-centered design practice
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1047671.1047677

This paper found that average adoption of UCD in software projects is
10%. Jacob had mentioned it to be 6% few years back. One draw back is
that all these analysis does not account much about standard
deviations, or probablity error on various projects.

All the best!

:D