[Sigia-l] Where is usability in the org chart?

[andrew at humaneia.com]

Quoting taltom at iei.net:

> I'm sure this must have come up in discussion before, but a search of the
> archives turned up nothing of consequence, perhaps because the number 
> of possible
> keywords is rather large.
>
> The question is twofold: First, where is usability located on your 
> org chart? And
> second, what are the pros and cons of being there?

JoAnn Hackos in "Managing Your Documentation Projects" talks about the 
evolution of an organisation from being a low/inconsistent 
documentation zone to being a centrally 
organised/self-improving/managed documentation zone.

Usability (and IA for that matter) in the Australian Government is 
mostly off the org chart entirely. There may be project/programme level 
inclusions (and more of these every passing year) of usability 
components, there may be a central usability test facility, but 
organisation-wide and -standard is not done here. It is still zero or 
ad hoc using JoAnn's organisational documentation maturity model. This 
is not to malign any person or organisation within Government that is 
actually doing it in an organisation-wide sense - I would love to hear 
about it if this is happening :)

I have seen some standards applied across multiple projects but they 
are usually of the "minimum required/not very useful" 5 minute session 
as part of user acceptance testing stuff where the system 
integrator/main contractor gets user representatives to sit through a 
potted set of interaction pathways presented to them on a projector 
then asks them what they thought of the system's usability (no, I am 
not kidding, wish that I was).

Cheers, Andrew

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