Usability practitioners or UCD Change Agents?

When usability practitioners view themselves as change agents who influences the methods by which products are developed and the way people manage development they will be of much more for an organization than improve the products they test.

There are different views on what a usability practitioners role is. According to Janice Redish it’s to help a team release a product (hardware, software, document, or web site) that works for its user. In his paper ‘Stimulating Change Through Usabilty Testing’ Joseph Dumas pleas for a more broad perspective on the usability practitioners role. He writes that as a person responsible for usability testing, you have the opportunity to become a change agent in your organization or in the organization you are conducting the test for.

In his view usability test can have a larger, long-range influence on the way an organization develops its products and so is more than a way to improve the usability of a single product alone.

According to Dumas there are four important practices one can follow in using testing to change the way people think about and develop products:

1. involve designers in test planning
2. Encourage their participation in tests.
3. Structure your test reporting so that it speaks not only to specific, product-related problems, but also to the underlying technical and organizational causes of problems.
4. Provide periodic feedback to designers and managers about progress toward long-term goals.

I totally agree with Dumas his more broad perspective on the field.

The idea that usability practitioners are change agents has implication for the way findings are being reported. Instead of linking a specific problem to a specific cause one should also figure out the root cause of the problem. For example. The user could not continue his task because the error message confused him. A bad error message may instead indicate that the people who wrote the message do not understand what the user is trying to do when the error occurs because they did not do a task analysis before they started their design.

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