Jerome Nadel, Executive Managing Director of Human Factors International, was the opening speaker at the SirsiDynix Institute Executive Conference at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. He talked about usability and user centric design as often thought to make things easier to do on the web. However, he focused on strategic usability, which reflects how you influence your customers to do what you want them to do and improves their ability to find what they are looking for. He talked about the third wave of the information ago and it’s shift to self serve making usability a requirement. With user centric design, Nadel emphasized that it had to be informed & validated:
1. understand your stakeholder (orgnization success criteria) and user needs which leads to intelligent design
2. design & validated design — requires usability testing
3. finalize & document — design the templates and standards
Nadel talked about how usability had to go beyond the tactical — a short term, quick, fix (reactive) — beyond institutionalized — more long term and structured processes and methodologies and infrastructure — to the strategic. Strategic usability goes to the core value proposition of an organization and focuses more on innovation, branding, opportunities and feeds the business markets and revenues. It can be achieved through the use of personas, scenarios, task design and information architecture. More on Nadel’s talk from Liz Lawley’s post.