hci as a business strategy report

7/28/2019 HCI as a Business Strategy Report

1/12

Jason Friedlander

Peter Hastings

HCI 450

May 29, 2011

HCI As A Business Strategy

I. INTRODUCTION

Every business starts with an idea, but the lack of defining and vetting that idea is

the difference between a successful business and a failure. The philosophy, strategy

and psychology of Human-computer Interaction (HCI), often called User Experience

Design (UXD), is a proven process for successfully vetting all different kinds of business

decisions. Decisions that range from products to internal tools that help to ensure a path

to success, all while avoiding the pitfalls of failure early and often. Apple is one of the

many companies that have embraced UXD as a business strategy and has found amaz-

ing success.

! I get asked a lot why Apple's customers are so loyal. It's not because they! belong to the Church of Mac! That's ridiculous. It's because when you buy our !! products, and three months later you get stuck on something, you quickly figure !! out [how to get past it]. And you think, "Wow, someone over there at Apple actu!! ally thought of this!" And then three months later you try to do something you !! hadn't tried before, and it works, and you think "Hey, they thought of that, too." !! And then six months later it happens again. There's almost no product in the !

HCI As A Business Strategy! Friedlander 1


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! world that you have that experience with, but you have it with a Mac. And you !! have it with an iPod.1

HCI can be used as a business strategy that helps to create products like the iPod

that are easy to use, fits the expectation the user, and above all meets business goals.

It is the job of the HCI professional within an organization to deliver on these goals.

The HCI professional has the difficult task of evaluating the place in which they work to

help define change and future strategy.

Above all they must be an evangelist of HCI to the stakeholders to ensure their

commitment to the process within the organization, because A company that cannot

commit emotionally and intellectually to creating their own future, even in the absence of

a strong financial business case, will almost certainly end up behind their competition.2

II. Building The Competitive Advantage

A company can learn many things from HCI to build that competitive advantage.

Companies only stand to success from this approach as they work to avoid the hard

facts associated with failed projects. Facts that are directly tied to not implementing and

HCI workflow.

Engineers spend up to 50% of their time reworking fixable issues.

The costs associated with fixing an error after the project is completed is 100%

more than fixing the same error during production.3


1 Jobs, Steve - The Seed ofApples Innovation. Business Week. 10/12/2004

2Hamel, Gary. Competing For The Future. Harvard Business School Press, 1994.

3 Charette, R.N. Spectrum, IEEE, Vol.42, Iss.9 (NA), Spet 2005


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There are six main advantages that HCI can bring internally to an organization that

will in turn build competitive advantage and increase ROI in the long run.4

i. Re-defining Business Process

HCI experts can take a holistic view of the corporation and their processes and help

to refine those practices to better streamline the business and make employees happier

and more productive.

ii. Create New Products and Services

By developing products based on research and the end user a company can gain

significant advantages in quality, innovativeness and time to market.

iii. Capturing Unique Information

HCI can help to develop ways to take a companies data that it has obtained

within its market and use it to their advantage. Marilyn tells the story of Harrahs ca-

sino who built an empire off of the data collected from their players club offering.

iv. Tying the Product to its Service Infrastructure

Find and develop ways to tie common services from across the company to cre-

ate a unique packaged offering. Managers of business units are often so focused on

their own team they dont look outside their bubble, but an HCI focused employee

can roam and should roam. They should see what Team A is doing and what Team X

has done and create new business opportunities for the company.

v. Managing Corporate Knowledge More Efficiently

Working with existing company interfaces to tie them together seamlessly with

existing processes. Companies often use many different products developed by


4 Tremaine, Marilyn. UXD & Competitive Advantage Lecture. Rutgers University. 2010


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many different software companies and it is the job of the HCI professional to make

that a more streamlined and seamless integration.

vi. Supporting Collaboration

Creating process efficiency amongst subunits within the company for a seamless

integration of work. Which is ever more present as workers start working more and

more from home and their mobile devices.5

III. Sell Your Way In

HCI professionals may find it very hard to get stakeholders within a company to see

the value of this type of approach. The impact of a UX team is often centered around

employee satisfaction and workflow efficiencies, which are tackled in small steps and

overall hard to quantify.

Many times corporations and their stakeholders will argue that HCI within their or-

ganization has little to no ROI. While that may be true on face value, meaning that inter-

nal HCI teams cant charge clients for their work, when a study was conducted by Clare-

Marie Karat she showed that by with every dollar invested on HCI practices within her

organization there was a 2 dollar return on that investment in the long run. A deeper

look into that study revealed the ROI to be even larger.6

An effective way for user experience teams to play bigger roles in an organization is

to create their own projects like Karat did. They should find issues that are around sig-

nificant user or business problems and generate consistent results. They can show their



6 Bias, Randolph G and Mayhew, Deborah J. Cost-Justifying Usability An Update for an

Internet Age. Morgan Kaufman Publishers. 2005.


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understanding of financial issues to better follow the ROI process and develop a busi-

ness case for their projects, which in-turn solve user experience issues and business

goals.7

IV. Sell Your Way Out

Just like an internal focused HCI professional, client focused ones must sell the

value of HCI to their companies clients. Customers must come to understand the ROI to

them if a vendor company takes a step back with each request and vettes all aspects of

the job. This needs to be done with varying scales based on the complexity of the job

and the timeframe allotted. Clients are not going to be happy with a vendor asking them

to change delivery dates so that they can throughly examine all the requirements, but

they will be happy if a vendor can make educated decisions based on doing the right

evaluations for each specific job to get the best possible end product. A product that

most importantly meets the end users needs.

Marilyn Tremaine says, There are tangible business results to an approach that

puts users at the center of design. She also defines areas in which a customer focused

HCI team can market their approach and value.

i. Preach To Your Clients

An HCI professional should be in constant contact with clients and supply them with

information on both the successes and failures.

ii. Make Clients Aware Of The Value Your Group Provides


7 Herman, Jeff. A Process for Creating the Business Case for User Experience Projects.

CHI EA '04 CHI '04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems


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This can be accomplished by going back and looking at the end product versus the

initial set of requirements. HCI professionals can present to the client cost savings and

changes based on adding and revising the requirements based on the user.

iii. Provide Great Work

The client must always see value in what your group brings to the table and whether

your group failed to spot a change that needed to be made or successfully launched a

product the same level of professionalism must always be put forth. Clients will respect

and value decisions if you are aware of mistakes. This is why it is important to reward

failure.8

V. Is Your Company Ready For UX?

Before any of the above happens you need to be make sure that your company is

ready to tackle a UXD approach into its current workflow.

! The Innovation Value Institute at the National University Ireland Maynooth !! ! is currently developing a UX Capability Maturity Framework (CMF) which !! ! is a an attempt to formalize the assessment of a businesses capability to !! ! engage in UXD across the following three dimensions:

1. User-centric Processes

2. Staffing and Training

3. Organizational Alignment

4. Management Commitment




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5. Strategy and Visioning9

The following chart helps to define the readiness of a corporation and can be used to

determine if the company is in the right position to take on the UXD process into its or-

ganization.


9 Sward, David and Macarthur, Gavin. Making User Experience a Business Strategy.CHI

'09 Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing

systems. 2009
http://www.chi2009.org/http://www.chi2009.org/http://www.chi2009.org/http://www.chi2009.org/http://www.chi2009.org/


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VI. Say No. Are You Crazy?

Service companies live and die by their salesforce and bringing in that next big job,

and a good HCI professional within that organization can protect their salesforce by

building up the companies reputation of success and that starts with saying no.

Often clients will approach a vendor company with an idea and a budget. The ven-

dors initial reaction is WOW! This is our next big job! when it really should be Is this

the right direction for our client? Taking a step back from the impact of the revenue of

this one job and applying HCI principles to evaluate the request may be the better ap-

proach.

A company should always observe a best-practice strategy where they can look at

the requirements set forth by their customer and determine whether it should be a gen-

eral implementation, customer-specific implementation or a requirement at all.10

Many companies will find that this type of approach will not only give them a better

understanding of the task at hand, but those few times a company may have to say no

and steer the client in a better direction may actually help to build up that businesses

reputation and save their client from a colossal failure and waste of money.

VII.Continuing ROI

Once a company has gotten a client to buy in on the process the real work begins. It

is going to be a difficult task of educating and managing the client on the right and

wrong way to work all while building ROI for your company long after a specific job is

complete. This is where customer experience management comes into play. Customer


10 Bias, Randolph G and Mayhew, Deborah J. Cost-Justifying Usability An Update for an

Internet Age. Morgan Kaufman Publishers. 2005.


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Experience Management is the practice of HCI as it directly relates to building and

maintaining clients for your business.

David Strom defines 5 key benefits from practicing customer experience manage-

ment during and after a projects life cycle to build future ROI within your company and

save on costs today. Four of those points as they relate to this paper are:

i. Reduce at-risk revenue. Recover potentially lost customers

! By following up with customers and keeping them in the loop companiescan use simple research methods derived from HCI such as surveys to determine

how successful they have been servicing their clients and then take action in the ar-

eas they are weak if needed.

ii. Engage existing customers as a sustainable engine for growth

! Use your best customers to market for you. Reward them for loyalty andrecommendations.

iii. Reduce the costs of new customer acquisition

! When you generate buzz with one client they are often going to recom-mend you to another and your company didnt have to spend any marketing dollars

to make that happen. It was all developed by keeping up a good working relationship

with your current client base.

iv. Engage employees. Reduce staff turnover and cost of hiring

! Keeping employees engaged is one of the best ways to increase ROI anddevelop new business avenues, but also reaching out to your employees the same



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way you do to your customers allows you to change direction of the ship before you

hit a storm. Happy employees make for extremely happy clients.11

VIII.ROI Through Innovation the Google Way

Google attempts to spark innovation through its employees. They make sure that

they dedicate at least 10% of individuals time, preferably 20% to innovation. The Google

model gives employees free time to work on a project of their choice. Googles founders

understand that innovation does not happen in a vacuum without time and attention.

The culture of innovation must be created and cultivated.

The Google model is based on the principles of HCI and ROI. As employees work on

these projects they are constantly finding new ways to innovate the Google product or

develop new avenues of business. Google makes sure to reward their employees for

failures as well as successes because they understand that without failure there will

never be that next great idea.

IX. CONCLUSION

As technology becomes increasing standardized, IT organizations that provide

compelling user experiences by understanding how to support employees rapidly

changing work practices will create a competitive advantage and impact their compa-

nies bottom lines.12


11 Strom, David. Top 5 ROI benefits of Customer Experience Management.

www.readwriteweb.com. 5/25/2011

12 Sward, David. Gaining a Competitive Advantage Through User Experience Design.

www.intel.com/IT White Paper. 2006
http://www.intel.com/IThttp://www.readwriteweb.com/http://www.intel.com/IThttp://www.intel.com/IThttp://www.readwriteweb.com/http://www.readwriteweb.com/


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The previous quote is from a white paper published by Intel. Intel is a company

much like Apple that has derived great success from practicing the principles of HCI

both internally and to their customer facing units. They talk about the benefits of know-

ing what their end user wants and needs and tying those directly back to business ob-

jectives.

A company can achieve success by adopting HCI think into their current business

strategy. It is not the sole answer but it is a major part of what successful businesses will

practice in the future. As laid out by Sward and Macarthur this can be achieved though

linking HCI to the bottom line of the firm, implementing a UXD program and managing

the companies capability.13


13 Sward, David and Macarthur, Gavin. Making User Experience a Business

Strategy.CHI '09 Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in

computing systems. 2009
http://www.chi2009.org/http://www.chi2009.org/http://www.chi2009.org/


12/12

Work Cited

1. Jobs, Steve - The Seed of Apples Innovation. Business Week. 10/12/2004

2. Hamel, Gary. Competing For The Future. Harvard Business School Press, 1994.

3. Charette, R.N. Spectrum, IEEE, Vol.42, Iss.9 (NA), Spet 2005

4. Tremaine, Marilyn. UXD & Competitive Advantage Lecture. Rutgers University. 2010

5. Bias, Randolph G and Mayhew, Deborah J. Cost-Justifying Usability An Update for

an Internet Age. Morgan Kaufman Publishers. 2005.

6. Herman, Jeff. A Process for Creating the Business Case for User Experience Pro-

jects. CHI EA '04 CHI '04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing sys-

tems

7. Strom, David. Top 5 ROI benefits of Customer Experience Management.

8. Sward, David. Gaining a Competitive Advantage Through User Experience Design.

www.intel.com/IT White Paper. 2006

9. Sward, David and Macarthur, Gavin. Making User Experience a Business

Strategy.CHI '09 Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors

in computing systems. 2009

http://www.chi2009.org/http://www.intel.com/IThttp://www.chi2009.org/http://www.chi2009.org/http://www.intel.com/IThttp://www.intel.com/IT

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