Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics
John S. Rhodes
2009
This is a very different type of user experience book. In “Selling Usability” John Rhodes explores ways in which a UX professional – or anyone wishing to push a UX agenda – can instill user experience concepts and activities into a company using a “bottom up” approach. It’s an interesting topic and one very much worthy of attention.
User experience activities are misunderstood and/or under prioritized in many companies. Rhodes seeks to provide the reader a set of tactics – subtle and otherwise – to help establish UX as a priority within organizations.
The book covers many approaches for this, and quite a lot of ground; however there are two themes I felt were particularly notable:
1. The need to communicate UX in terms of its impact on the bottom line. Rhodes explains that most UX people focus on techniques and activities, rather than the positive impact they can have on business performance. This of course is a mistake. In one section Rhodes gives an example of a UX employee explaining the results of a recent user study and gives an example of more productive language and framing:
“What you should say: ‘We know that customers can’t figure out how to enter discount codes on our web site. I reviewed this with our sales team; we’re losing about $24k per month. They also indicated that we’re at risk of losing 10% of our customers permanently. I spoke with the design team and we can fix this problem for $80k.’”
2. Avoiding jargon and communicating about UX in familiar lanugage. Rhodes points out that it’s easy to fall into the trap of communicating in UX industry language, instead of the language of the peers and stakeholders you’re trying to reach. As he puts it,
“It is imperative to simplify your language in discussions about user experience with people who aren’t familiar with it. Like it or not, UX isn’t the easiest concept to grasp and the research techniques take a little time to explain.”
These two themes – which appear throughout the book – make it worth the read alone, as they’re critical to dialog that establishes UX as a catalyst for business success.
Rhodes writes in chapter two,
“Before you say or do anything regarding UX, think about what it means to the bottom line. Modify your language to be more in line with the true intentions of the business.”
“Selling Usability” also food for thought on ways that building relationships within an organization helps drive a UX agenda.
Rhodes also includes a number of clever ideas such as volunteering to take meeting notes or edit presentations and project documents so as to ensure that UX discussion gets included.
Chapters in the book are fairly short, making it easy to pick up and put down as time allows. Each chapter closes with a quick summary of the main points; it’s a nice touch.
“Selling Usability” also includes some ideas that I found interesting but worthy of debate. For example in chapter 15 “Getting Into the Quality Clubhouse” Rhodes discusses the similarities between quality assurance and UX initiatives. He goes on to suggest that UX can be piggybacked onto QA in some companies. I don’t doubt this is possible sometimes, though my own view is that placing UX too close to QA risks the company misunderstanding the role of UX and deeming it a final check before a product is completed, as opposed to an integral part of concept, design, and production. I’ve worked with a few companies in which “user acceptance testing” (essentially last-minute QA) and usability were placed into the same category; this is not a good scenario for a UX professional or advocate.
There are a few things about the book I felt could have been improved:
- I wonder if the title could more effectively communicate the thrust of the book. “Selling usability from within” for example would differentiate the more general topic of selling usability and usability ROI from Rhodes’ book which is more about injecting UX into an organization. That said, the themes I mentioned above (focusing on bottom-line results; communicating in business terms) are just as important to selling UX from the outside of a company as it is from within.
- I was a little uncomfortable with several generalizations about professionals. For example on page 94 Rhodes likens designers to peacocks and writes,
“They live and die based on the praise that others lavish on them… they need to know that they are needed and loved.”
That statement may well resonate with anyone who’s ever worked with an artist but it seems a bit uncharitable. I’ve worked with many designers and other artists in my time; certainly some are fueled by ego and praise. But I’m not quite ready to put them all into the same basket (case). Admittedly I may have misunderstood the author’s intent with those passages.
Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics
Disclosure: The author of this book is an acquaintance of mine and we worked together on several consulting projects a few years ago.
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