World Usability Day 2012 at ui42: Martin Krupa speaks about stages of usability adoption in companies according to Jacob Nielsen. Martin presents his overview about state of usability in Slovakia since 2005.

1. Corporate Usability Maturity
Martin Krupa ui42

2. Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, April 24, 2006
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/maturity.html
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3. Stage 1: Hostility Toward Usability
• „Nás nezaujímajú používatelia.“
• „Zabila by som tých používateľov.“
• Developers don't want to hear about users or their
needs; their only goal is to build features and make them
work
• ...hostility toward usability predominated in most IT shops
until the 1980s
• Forget about promoting usability
• People have to want to change before there's any chance of
helping them do so.
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4. Stage 2: Developer-Centered Usability
• “Teraz nemáme čas. Aj keby sme spravili usability
testovanie, developeri nič z toho nespravia.“
• Design team relies on its own intuition.
• Works well for one class of design problem:
developing tools, such as Web servers, for developers
or other geeks (Perl, Linux, Apache, ...)
• For non-geek audiences, it's disastrous to rely on the
design team's understanding of what's easy: Anyone
working on a project knows much too much about
it to represent outside users.
• People care about usability!
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5. Stage 3: Skunkworks Usability
• “Som stratil všetky ilúzie o používateľoch.“
• „We shouldn't rely on the design team's personal judgment.“
• No budget allocated
• Ad hoc usability activities driven by user advocates who want a
bit more data to improve the quality of the one thing they're
working on at the moment.
• Manager hires an external usability expert for the company's first-
ever independent assessment of user-experience quality.
• When designs get a small usability injection, they get better
• Downside: great usability seems so obvious that management
might not recognize how much work was required to simplify the
design.
• Save the initial design ideas, make case studies
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6. Stage 4: Dedicated Usability Budget
• Nemáme žiadne citáty 
• Budget allocated (10%) - usability is planned & a few people
have usability in job description
• Usability as a magic potion that's sprinkled sparsely over a
user interface to shine it up.
• Main usability method is user testing, which is invariably
conducted late in the development process after the user
interface has been at least partially implemented.
• You need more than a couple of success stories.
• ROI is needed (higher conversion rates, fewer calls to the
helpdesk, better intranet productivity, …)
• Collect results across your usability projects
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7. Stage 5: Managed Usability
• Official usability group, led by usability manager
Stage 6: Systematic Usability Process
• Process for tracking user experience quality
• Usability is part of job of all managers and team members
Stage 7: Integrated User-Centered Design
• Each project has defined usability goals
Stage 8: User-Driven Corporation
• Usability determines what types of projects the company should fund
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8. Stage 1: decades
Stage 2-4: 2-3 years each stage
Stage 5-7: 6-7 years each stage
Stage 8: 20 years
Start-ups are lucky and can begin the maturity process at stage 3 or
stage 4, depending on the founder's previous usability experience.
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9. How to
• Fast Track methodology (design & prototyping)
• “Agile Usability Engineering”
• “Extreme Design”
• “Intensive Usability”
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10. Contact
Martin Krupa
krupa@ui42.sk
www.ui42.sk/usability
www.ui42.sk/blog
Twitter: @martinkrupa
+421 905 403 728
ui42 spol. s r.o.
Haydnova 20/B
811 02 Bratislava