February, 2004 – How Can You "Insure" Usability? – Achieving Routine User-Centered Design for Anthem's 12 Million Members Worldwide

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Welcome to the usability broadcast network sponsored by Human Factors International. Today's presentation is a case study of how a company, Anthem, made usability a routine business practice. I am Dr. Susan Weinschenk, Chief of Technical Staff at HFI. And I am very glad to have with me here today Kyle Tolar, Usability Program Director at Anthem. Welcome Kyle, welcome to our program.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Thanks a lot.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Mr. Kyle, to start with off today, can you tell us a little bit about what a usability program director does at Anthem?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Sure. I am on the executive leadership team for e-business in Anthem with a few other folks. We are responsible across the board for products that are developed for and delivered over anthem.com. One of the responsibilities that I picked up a number of years ago was to institutionalize a usability program in Anthem. So I generally worked very closely with the design staff, with the developers to develop good applications, but we wanted to bring a formal presence to usability at Anthem.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: So that must have been very challenging.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: It was (laughter). Yes, it was.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Can you tell us a little bit about some of the challenges that you faced as you did that?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Sure. I think the most basic thing was my own challenge. I had been in web development for you know 10, 12 years but didn't really have a depth in the science that is behind usability. So much like I think many of the people at Anthem or other companies, when I first read of usability I thought what size font are we supposed to use. What color is good for the eye? Getting into it I found there was a lot more, which challenged me in other areas. How do I implement a new methodology without changing our development cycle? Without increasing our budget? So it's here's something that's very important and as you get further into the subject you find out how important it is and how critical it is for the success of an e-business program without changing your cycles, without spending a lot more money. So that I think overall that's the biggest challenge. How do you get a big bang from the buck without fundamentally changing the way you do business.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: So it became more than just you and what you were going to do, but you started actually dealing with changes within the organization.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely. And a company the size of Anthem, and a website like anthem.com we track over 70 different functions that we treat as individual applications. So obviously as one person I can't touch all 70 of those. So it's critical to look out into the organization and find people who had the skills, had the desire to get into usability work and implement that as part of the regular daily job with again without you know new work to the table, without changing what we were developing for our end users.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: And how long has this process being going on for you at Anthem?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: It's been almost 3 years now. And I think we really kicked off a formal program where we had goals, objectives, and things that we were tracking in the first of last year. So I spent a good 6 months. First getting myself up to speed I went through the HFI programs and the certification program to feel like I was an expert in when I was trying to bring forward. Then we started with a training program, which we'll hear about a little bit later in today's program. And then by the first part of next year, that next year 2003, we had a full fledged program in place.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: You know, one of the things I wanted to mention was we have, Dr. Eric Schaffer has a new book out on institutionalization of usability and I know that the content of this book was partially fuelled by companies like yours and the kind of situations and challenges that you went through.

Well, we have a main presentation today and we're going to hear from several of your team, your usability team ...

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: And people surrounding and supporting them.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yes.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: At Anthem. So let's go ahead and see that presentation.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Thank you for joining us today. My name is Kyle Tolar with Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Anthem is one of the nations leading providers of health benefits to more than 12 million members worldwide. As an executive director of our e-business program, my responsibilities include rolling out a usability initiative over the last 2 years. Anthem's core mission is to improve the health of the members that we serve and to deliver world class service. E-business has been a central component to that. Usability has been a key differentiator to make our e-business program world class. Working with an outstanding team including executive sponsor Mark Boxer, Mary Stanlin, Mark Holland, and Laura Herron. We will explore several subjects today including executive sponsorship, training, standards, and resources to support the usability initiative.

At any time during this presentation please feel free to click the submit question button. Questions will be collected and after the main part of the presentation, we will answer them. Again thank you for joining us today.

Now we're going to go to the main part of our program and joining us today is Mark Boxer, Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer here at Anthem. Mark's responsibilities include among other things leading the e-business effort here at Anthem. Mark was instrumental in getting the e-business and usability programs started here. Thanks for joining us today, Mark.

Mr. Mark Boxer: Thank you Kyle. Very pleased to be here and talk about usability.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: First Mark I thought we would start and ask you to give us a little background. How did you bring usability? Why did you bring usability to Anthem?

Mr. Mark Boxer: Well, if you go back and look at why we brought usability, the principles around usability in to the design of anthem.com they all go back to the business guide and the website. Website only has value if you see a document pay back. That is is the website being used? Does it have the right features and the functions. Are people returning to use it for their service transactions, for the e-health content, for the routine services that they need from the site. What are the ways that we can promote the site by making it more usable? A person comes to a website, it's not easy to navigate, it's not easy to use, it's not intuitive, they're not going to return. By embedding usability principles into the design of our website we found we could improve the service experience as we support Anthem's strategy to be easy to do business with. We've been quite pleased with the results that we've gotten from the usability work. Look at anthem.com several years ago, it was not as usable as it is today. It wasn't intuitive, it wasn't simple, it took many more clicks to find information and services. Today if you come to anthem.com you find it's intuitive, it's easy to navigate, the information is where you'd expect it to be, and it takes much fewer clicks to find the services, products, and features that you need. Pretty routine functions as well as the information and content you need to access on a periodic basis. Most importantly, we are deriving business values from this work by increasing the number of visitors coming to anthem.com, by making it easier to use we have more visitors. By making it easy to navigate those visitors find the features and functions they need quickly. They are doing more self service online. It's helping drive the pay back up. They perform their routine service functions through anthem.com as opposed to calling our call center that reduces our cost. But most importantly, it provides an additional service channel for them to access anthem to get the answers, to get the tools, to get the services they need, where they want it, when they want it, on an always available basis.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Thanks Mark.

Mr. Mark Boxer: Thank you Kyle.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: And now for our second guest. Joining us is Mary Stalin, Vice President of E-Business for Anthem. Mary's responsibilities include the entire e-business program including retail development as well as enterprise development. Thanks for joining us Mary.

Ms. Mary Stalin: Thank you.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: I was hoping you could start and may be describe Anthem's approach to usability training.

Ms. Mary Stalin: Well, thanks Kyle. As you know, building overall e-business competencies for more than 20,000 Anthem associates has been a key area of focus for the entire business team over the last 3 years so we've been building out our capabilities. We've been successful at building a core curriculum adding (inaudible) business and we've used that corporate (inaudible) as a spring board to focus our training efforts around usability to a much more targeted group of e-business and IT professionals in our program. We realized we had a sizeable challenge ahead of us however when it came to deploying a training program around usability, first of all around the subject matter itself. One of our training objectives was to provide a consistent learning experience on the topic that most of our group was either not familiar with or had a very uneven experience in terms of knowledge base. We also had a challenge to overcome the perception that usability was more than what a website looked like, the fonts and the colors. And that usability is rather a science, a very disciplined, methodical approach to the user experience.

The second challenge we had was giving the right training to the right people. Anthem is a very large company with multiple locations with multiple organizations. We had a very broad audience that needed a baseline level of learning and understanding. And at the same time we had small audiences requiring deeper levels of skill development.

And finally and equally important, we needed to develop a balanced program that didn't take too much time away from key people and their jobs for too long extended period of time and at the same time fit into some of our budget requirements in delivering this program. So you might say what did we do from there? We worked with HFI to develop a program that provided enough flexibility for us to meet the varying needs that we had coming in to this program.

Our first step was we started out with an executive level overview that was targeted at approximately 20 e-business leaders in our organization to give them a fundamental baseline understanding of the usability curriculum that their teams would then be working from. We then targeted what we called project level resources responsible for developing and maintaining our websites. People like project managers, project leaders, business analysts, and actually our development teams. We brought HFI on site allowing us to hit the maximum number of people at the same time. And finally, I think this is one of the most important things we did, we invested in a select number of individuals to pursue the CUA, the Certified Usability Analyst program. This is a certification program and we now have 8 individuals within Anthem that we rely as subject matter experts to train our own people.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Great. So there was an awful lot of activity going around training. Sounds like a fairly extensive programming we have in place. Can you describe some of the challenges we faced putting that together, rolling it, and maintaining that?

Ms. Mary Stalin: Sure. In many instances training is one of the things that gets the lowest priority, but one of our key focuses within the e-business team is on training and development. We consider our people an asset and we want them to get the tools to develop themselves. We are a core small enterprise e-business team. And we rely on what we call matrix relationships that is partnerships to be successful. But that means on the practical level and deploying training programs is that we are pulling people away from their day to day jobs and this may be challenging. So one of the things that we did and I believe was very critical to the success of this program was to have strong executive sponsorship and leadership. And what we did there was by offering an executive a view of the program they were able to understand the components of the program, the quality of the program, and what their teams would get from it.

The second thing that's very challenging in any training effort is just fundamentally maintaining the curriculum and the content. We continue to use HFI to provide the support for new associates and others who may be appropriate candidates for the CUA program. Another thing is keeping the knowledge and information fresh. And we've used a variety of tools, presentations, and web casts, and live speakers, and tele-conferences to continue to keep usability in front of people. We intentionally stayed away from customization so that we can take advantage of a lot of the more public programs that are available for our associates. Once again, I think we've taken the program and challenged ourselves to take the program one step further with the curriculum. And we're now working with HFI to deliver a sub set of those core materials to our own CUAs so they continue to promote the curriculum and to develop the skills that we specifically want them to focus on. We are very committed to delivering multi programs to our associates to continue to get the word out and to really position our CUAs as a usability champions throughout Anthem.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: And Mary, I'd like to thank you again for joining us today (inaudible).

Ms. Mary Stalin: Thank you.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Joining us now is Mark Holland. Mark is one of our Executive Directors on our Enterprise E-Business Team. Welcome Mark.

Mr. Mark Holland: Hello.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Mark's responsibilities include the overall management of anthem.com as a company asset and responsible for standards and interactive guidelines. Mark, I thought we would start by asking you to give us some overview of where our standards were when we started the formal usability program.

Mr. Mark Holland: Initially what we had in place was a series of design guidelines and some very basic templates and basic documentation and that's what we gave to our business partners and our developers. Developers of the applications as well as content, site design. And those worked well as a getting started point. But they were very difficult a little long (inaudible) taking a website that is really a collection of many websites, many moving parts with different sets of ownership. And the problem with design guides, style guides, those types of things and disbursing them in the organization is that it leaves too much room for interpretation. And essentially while everybody kind of came close to what we were looking for in terms of an overall look and feel in usability standards, it didn't hit the development mark all the time. And it increased our development time and it increased really I think the difficulty in bringing a collection of assets together as one entity.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Good. What impacts have you seen on anthem.com since we've implemented usability standards?

Mr. Mark Holland: Well, I think we've seen certainly the effectiveness of the website in terms of its ability to draw the membership as well as other constituents to using the website. We do a lot in collecting feedback from our members and our other constituents. And we've certainly seen that feedback become more and more positive as we progress down the usability pipe. It's been much easier for us to develop an overall brand strategy and merge that with usability, good detailed design templates as well as you know training our organization on how to bring usability into all aspects of the site as it is designed. And even really as we build through requirements gathering, usability is in at the very beginning.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Great. Can you compare the effectiveness of using a tool like usability central versus the traditional and historical methods we used for managing (inaudible).

Mr. Mark Holland: Yeah, I mean in the traditional mechanisms were really a combination of paper and phone calls and faxes and not being able to disseminate throughout an enterprise organization as large as Anthem. To be able to disseminate that information effectively and have people read it and interpret it in the same way, it's not possible. For us, usability central kind of brought all that together and is very easy to communicate and train having you know one essential source of the information that everybody felt that they could trust and that was highly customized to meet Anthem's needs in terms of our development for web and web applications.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Good. Thanks Mark. I think it would be good for the audience if you could may be overview the key success factors, the key things that you did to make the standards successful here.

Mr. Mark Holland: Sure, one I mean every large company has a method for developing web applications and for managing their web assets as does Anthem. What we didn't have was the usability and the usability central piece stackered into that full development program. Now we do. And we've done that through training. We've done that through high visibility of usability central as well as making sure that everyone understands that usability central is really a foundational element of all the web work we do. And we've seen that our business partners and our developers, our developers really were kind of reaching out for something like usability central. I mean they don't want to be business partners and to want to tell you go to these web sites that should do these two things. But developers need more than that. They want to follow templates. They want their applications to have a good look and feel. You know they want to do the right thing for the end user. And this became a tool for everybody. So nobody was in the dark in the development process. The business folks who were requesting the applications and contents understand the framework that they have to work in and then developers that aren't left holding the bag trying to figure out how can I make this not only address the business needs but really address the users' needs from a functionality and usability perspective. And usability central really got us there I think.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Okay, good. One last thing from an outside perspective. What kind of feedback have you got since the systems have been in place, things like matrix, customer satisfaction, what has the result been in measurable terms?

Mr. Mark Holland: Well, clearly, you know, Anthem sets goals for itself at the beginning of every year in terms of what they want for a number of users on the site, adoption. But all of those types of things and we've seen user satisfaction. Those numbers have sky rocketed. We have exceeded our plan year over year. And I really attribute most of this to the usability central and what it has brought to the table. I mean the website was already there. But now it's an effective website. In addition to that, you know, Anthem like a lot of large websites doesn't produce all of it's own content. We have a number of partnerships in place. And what we've done with usability central doesn't justify internally. We apply all those principles and rules and templates to all the partnerships that we have in place for all the content, tools, and applications that we add to our website to create the overall experience for all of our constituents. And I think usability central really has been core at being able to deliver something uniform to everyone.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Alright. Thanks for joining us, today.

Mr. Mark Holland: Thank you.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Now we're going to pause a moment and go to an audience polling question as we've done in previous web casts. So we're going to ask a question and you'll see the question reflected on the screen. Please respond with your answer within 30 seconds. The question we're going to ask now is how well does your website fit within to your own standards? A 100%, 75%, 50, 25, or you wish you had a standard?

Mark, once you've discussed that a little bit, how well does anthem.com fit into the standards today?

Mr. Mark Holland: I think anthem.com is probably more along the lines of a 100% and I mean the reason for that today is that just as good organizations have high standards around their brand and their offline materials, today we recognize that a website for a corporation is an asset. And having standards and managing through those standards becomes critical for the corporation. It's the always on face you have to your public and your constituents. And that has become very important for us and we've pretty much have stuck pretty rigidly to the standards that we've put out.

Mr. Mark Boxer: Usability central has been key to that obviously having the comprehensive guidelines. One think I think we've done personally well at anthem.com is put processes in place to help manage review processes to make sure things that are going out are reflective of the brand.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Sure, I mean the usability central is fundamental really to anything that we do on the website. And it is part of our process today. And I think that having it has part of our process up front as well as all the way through any of our initiatives. You know that's what allows me to be able to say that we're closer to a 100% than any other number. And it's really been effective for us.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Well, let's see what the audience says. And joining us now is Laura Herron (inaudible). Laura Herron is Director of E-Business for Anthem East and in that role is responsible for developing constituent functionality for members, corporates, employers, and providers in the Eastern region. Laura Herron and her team have been at the forefront of institutionalizing usability within anthem.com. Welcome Laura Herron.

Ms. Laura Herron: Thank you.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Laura Herron, I thought we'd start by asking you how you learnt about building and organizing the skill sets responsible for implementing usability into the development activity.

Ms. Laura Herron: Okay. Great. Well, it was important for us to look for ways that we could implement this program without really disrupting too much of our budget or time line, because obviously our customers are interested in the features. They don't necessarily think about usability and how important usability is. We did recognize that that was important and fit it into our goals for this year and last year as well. So early on the program we looked to this corporate usability group to help us figure out the right way to do that. And they came up with a couple of different ideas that really seemed to help us out. One is that we started working on a formal usability program. And the second one was that we augmented our current resources with some additional resources to help us get the work done. What that did is it allowed us to put together, put in place some current standards that would help us get the work done consistently. And it also helped us to focus on delivery of our on plan whilst still trying to incorporate the usability objectives.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Great. So that sounds like quite a bit of work. What type of challenges did you face in doing it?

Ms. Laura Herron: Well, as I said before, budget is always a challenge and we struggled with different ways of trying to incorporate usability into our existing delivery schedule so that it wasn't a stand alone (inaudible) or a stand alone deliverable. And that helped us a lot as well. You know typically usability or the design of a system has just been simply (inaudible) with the developers work stream. And when we started to look at this work, we realized that it probably wasn't quite the right way to do it. Because the developer thinks of the technical constraints of the system and we wanted to make sure the best design to make the system work well. They don't necessarily think in the context of the customer and what the customer will you know find useful and helpful in navigation in the way of pages laid out etc. etc. The other thing again that I mentioned that we've struggled with is trying to find a way to build this entire program without really taking the rest of our value off of it, off of track you know, out of our delivery schedule for the year. So it's been a hard sell for us with our internal business partners with customers. Because you can't really say to them we're going to go out and spend 6 months working on usability. They can't feel it. They can't get it. They can't understand what the value is or the return on investment for usability work. So really those two things, resources and budget and then messaging with our business partners for prioritization I would say are our greatest challenges.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Good. What type of impact have you seen after implementing the usability program?

Ms. Laura Herron: Well, it's kind of amazing. You know, it's one of those things that you think about as being you know it's important but you don't know how important it is until after it's done. In addition to some objective scores of usability that we've done, objective assessments that we've done, we've also noticed an increase in the value chain. And of course that's not you can't relate directly to the way (inaudible) you've done in usability. But I think it's really gone a long way towards helping us. We have like it really integrating with our customers. The other thing like I would say is we've probably seen just a better result in surveys and informal feedback that we get from our customers on the way an application works. And to some degree I think it also some level of efficiency that's been in our development work because it's the more logical flow of information.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Great, thank you very much.

Ms. Laura Herron: Thank you.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: And now we're ready for our second audience polling question. How is your usability staffing level? You need 10%. Do you have too many, you know, need more, need a lot more? Laura Herron, how do you feel about that question?

Ms. Laura Herron: Well, we've done a couple of different things here to try to help our staffing level. Initially we really had nobody focusing on this. Now we have a couple of different purchases that we've taken to try to augment some of our staff. First of all, we're leveraging the center of excellence to help us work with HFI as in the usability work. Secondly, we've also trained a few of our (inaudible) and some of our internal resources on usability assessment and usability design to make sure that we have some managing internally on this. And that seems to have done the job.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Great. Audience, make your choices now. We appreciate you joining us for this web cast today. And I'd like to thank again Mark Boxer, Mary Stanlin, Mark Holland, and Laura Herron (inaudible) for joining us and diving in to some of the issues that we've faced over the last several years in implementing usability here at Anthem.

As we look out to the future, there are few key things that we're going to focus on to continue this development process. First, we'll continue to build this field sets and develop our associates to understand the breadth of usability and how it can impact our customers. We will continue working on our culture, a culture that's built around user centered design, understanding what our users will go through on a daily basis as they interact with us via the internet. And further refine and hone our usability program to make sure we're always addressing the most immediate needs of those that pay off the highest and will most impact the health of our members and their experience on anthem.com. As we move forward, we can recognize that usability is now a way of doing business. It's how we do e-business. And we're confident in the foundation that it has given us to move forward as an e-business program.

Now we're going to return to the portion of the program where we answered questions that have come up throughout the broadcast.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Welcome back to the question and answer section of our program. And for those of you who still want to ask a question, you can still do so. Go ahead and submit questions with the submit question button. Actually, I'd like to start us off on the questions with a question I have for you. Mark Boxer is what we would call a usability champion. And what do you think has been the critical contribution that having someone in that role has made in Anthem?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Well, it is a very important thing to have somebody at an executive level that can really champion these ideas and take them out into the field. Mark really was the first one that called me into his office and said get something going in usability for us. So he recognized the strategic level that this was the key differentiator for us in the future. Then the next level we took it to the leadership level, actually trained our leadership team as we mentioned in the video. Gave them the 2-hour introduction with Mark sitting there at the table. So we really got that executive by and people took the program seriously. They knew it was something they had to pay attention to even if they didn't understand the depth of the curriculum itself. So very, very important.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Very important role.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay. Good. Well, you know before we get in we have quite a few people submitting questions which we are going to get to in a second. But I would like to do the polling questions that we got. So let's start with those first. So I'll hold that up so we can remember what the question was and show what the answers are. How well does your website fit within your standard? And here's the answers we've got. 8% of the people said it fit a 100%. 37% said it fit 75%. Then we have 13% for 50. 6% for 25. and 35% for the people saying they wish they had a standard.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Are you surprised by these numbers?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yeah, the 35% whish they had a standard, I'm not surprised. I was surprised that that number was so high in the 75% range. If you get 75% of your site within standard, that's doing great and the people whose sites that I visited on a regular basis must not be able to call today (laughter) because there is still an awful lot of work I think.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: They are in the 35% (inaudible)

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: When I was looking at these numbers, it almost seemed like there was a split. There were people who were basically saying we've got the standard (inaudible)

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Almost done and (inaudible)

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: And the rest of them saying yeah, we haven't done it.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay. Let's do the other polling question which is how is your usability staffing level. You need 10%. So do you have gee! Are we surprised (laughter). Nobody says they have too many, you can never have too many usability people. 16% said no. 41% said need more and 42% said need a lot more.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yeah.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: So what's your experience with that? I mean do you have your ideal number of usability staff?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Well, we were talking a little bit before the show today and actually when we started the program I wasn't I didn't get head count to add a staff to the organization.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: You were it.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: We were it, I was it (laughter). So we had to find ways to work it in to our normal job duties. We had designers. We had people that did things like this. So we had it worked into the staff.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: So you're saying you didn't have a usability staff.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: You were having your regular staff of developers try and learn and do more usability in their work.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely. So it wasn't like we were bringing a new staff to ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Staff to do it.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: To take care of those.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: We had to take pieces of existing roles and bring that in. So everybody always wants more staff, particularly you get out of the 2-weeks worth of training that you will go through for a CUA certification. You see well here are all the things that I can do to make my website better.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: You could see an army of people surrounding you to do that on every process.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Well, you know when I give talks and I use this 10% number and I tell them right away you know don't feel bad. Very few people ever hit that.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: But it is an interesting number to work with, because when if you calculate what your real number is and it's like 0.0001% (laughter).

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: You know then you realize no wonder, I have too much to do. Right?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay, well, let's go ahead and take some of the questions in from our audience. We'll start with this one. I work for an insurance company not nearly the size of Anthem. But some of the needs will most likely be the same. I am finding it difficult to convince staff and company executives as to the importance of usability in both our intra and internet sites. Problem being that many of the key decision makers do not use the internet. (Laughter) Old school. That's interesting. To do any kind of business do you have any suggestions as to how to get the point across to them? Did you have that in Anthem or not?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Well, we certainly have pockets of that still today, but and it's one of the things that I know Mark Boxer has been very concerned about and the others on the team have been concerned about since we started the e-business program really back several years ago. I would ay the best thing to get any executive to really appreciate usability is do a usability test and video tape it and show them that tape.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: I'd like them watch.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yeah. We just did a test on one of our key strategic initiatives a couple of weeks ago with the help of HFI and you know even me who's been involved in this for 3 years, I'm still hearing things that you know shocked me or embarrassed me ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: About some of the things we've got on our website today. So I think that's one big thing. But a couple of you know got to be forced to research or Jupiter. Even you know Gartner you know some of the independent research houses, they're talking about usability. So certainly you can't turn all of the old school people into e-business fans overnight. But those things will certainly help.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: And I think you're about if you can get them to sit in on a usability test or at the very least do a really good highlights tape and it's almost like they have to see it to understand.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay, good. Let's go to the next one. How did you most effectively incorporate the centers of excellence into your development cycle and what were the key benefits the service offered your organization, because Laura Herron mentions that the center of excellence but doesn't say a lot about it.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: So talk about that a little bit.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: The centers of excellence, well we were just talking about staffing. One of the things that I figured out early on was there is sort of a strategic side of usability sitting down with business users, sitting down with the users really determining what – where to put our emphasis on the critical piece of usability. Then there's the routine side, the graphics, the buttons, the following the standards, doing the html prototypes, and again I couldn't add a whole lot of staff. So I looked at HFI. You just developed this concept of centers of excellence. So we're actually able to add staff that wasn't sitting on our site that was dedicated to us, trained CUA certified, almost across the board implemented their tools. So what we tried to do was really focus the strategic pieces, the higher end skills, sort of ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Kind of the infrastructure part of usability you mean?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Exactly. In fact, we called that the factory.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: So we have our CUAs and we have about 8 CUAs now in our organization. They sit down with the business users. They sit down with the development teams, really try to draw out what the most benefit of the usability initiative could be for a particular application. But all the prototyping, all of the sort of the repetitive work we partner with our CE team at HFI and get a lot of that work done so we can a lot more into each project without extreme cost.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: So they've sort of added to your staff and ...

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Since you couldn't have your own, right?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: And to give a little bit more. (Laughter) The nice part of having a partner to do that, you don't have to manage the staffing. You can scale up. You know we always have third quarter, fourth quarter we're usually very, very busy. So we need a little additional help.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Those are more there.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: We might scale it back at the 1st of the year when we've done some other things. So having a partner to help you manage that relationship has been fantastic.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Good. Alright, next question here. How important do you think certification is in usability and which holds more weight, certification from a consultant vendor like HFI or a university?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: That's a great question. I think the training program and certification program that we've gone through at HFI has been a fantastic training course, obviously, we have put some 8 people through it. And the difference between the training and the certification is good I think for the individual. They can pass that test. They can demonstrate that they've accomplished this. And they have a credential at least when they go and work with the teams. So I think getting some of the basics in that is very helpful and have some type of label that you can say I've passed this benchmark. Now what I can't say is from the university side, you know, education. I wondered that myself and I was hoping may be you could answer that portion of the portion. Like I what does it make sense for somebody like me to go back to school and get may be a more formal degree.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Masters or a Ph.D. in it.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Well, and you know for those of us who are I won't say the age but of a certain age (laughter) we have graduated. I have a Ph.D. in Psychology. Now a days you can get masters or Ph.D. in human factors or usability in particular. You know I have clients asking that question a lot. And if you are really wanting to understand the true deep science behind it, and you know you've worked with some of our consultants on projects and when we're working you know we're bringing in all of this knowledge and well, people read this way and people think this way, and their mental model is kind of – and all of that body of knowledge is really what would come from getting a graduate degree. So if you, what I usually find is people have such a passion for learning (laughter) more they get so excited about it that that's when they'll decide to go on for more education. But I have to say, it's rare. I mean it's hard right to

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: To take time off from your work and decide to go on. But I would encourage everyone to do it.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yeah, I mean in our experience it has been great. So we've been able to bring in Ph.D.s like yourself for that 2-week period.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Right.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Where we need to do something really in depth we have had the CE team who has you know a lot of graduate degrees and certifications, a lot of the skills and then bringing our own skills. And then we've sent probably a hundred people through the 3-day science

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah, wasn't that wonderful

Mr. Kyle Tolar: And art of web design than in additionally through other classes.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Certifications.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: So its' good to have the different levels ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: The range, it is important.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay. Next question, do you have a usability lab with video capture editing equipment? Do you run usability studies on a continual basis in the lab?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yep. My lab is actually in my car right now. It's a laptop with a (inaudible).

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay. Just to say a lab in a box (laughter) you know it's a special portable lab. You have a portable lab.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: No, like other organizations, because I've seen even some of your previous web casts where you've talked about you know the fancy, fancy stuff that you have that some people have at their sites and we don't know we found, and I mentioned the tests we did a couple of weeks ago. We went to a marketing firm that does focus groups and had the facilities and we'd rented it for 2 days, because we needed that level. But really for the most part, the best usability testing I think that can be done as passing some of it in a whole way. Putting in paper prototype (inaudible) what do you think of this. You know you can have that range.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Yes.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: And with the technology even just what we did in our focus group the only thing that room brought is a two-way glass and some ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Facilities and (inaudible).

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: But you know one of the things that I think is interesting is I think because you have the executive champion, some of you know lot of our clients the lab is kind of what gets things started.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: And a lab is how they generate interest.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Sure.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: And then they get the high-level executive to come in and watch.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: And sometimes it's the only way to move things I think because you had Mark and you had your executive champion I think that that ...

Mr. Kyle Tolar: We were able to do that.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: You may not have needed a lab as much.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Sure.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Yes.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: The remote lab is another nice thing as well. I know you cover that in some of your curriculum, but we've done a lot of testing. Anthem is across the United States. So the idea of getting enough people in one place to do a usability test is difficult. So web meaning type of (inaudible)

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Remote usability testing, yes, and we do try a lot of that. That's really that works well. Okay, next question. What is included, we kind of have two questions that are related here. We have what is usability central and then we have what is included in usability central? So let's answer that one first and there are a couple of other questions here. And I guess I can answer that.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: That's right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: And I may have a question for you about it. So usability central is a product that Human Factors International has developed and I like to think of it as a repository of an organization's intellectual property around usability. It comes with methodology, the Schaffer method. It comes with templates and standards and guidelines. But the idea is that you would then customize this and add to it and so that's why I say it becomes your repository of usability work at the company.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: So that's what usability central is. It's a product that we sell. But and I know in the video we've talked a lot about it. But do you want to say a few words about what you thought it brought to the table?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yeah. It's been nice. And there is a lot of content there and I'll say that I don't go through all of it.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: You don't have it on memory?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: It's all (inaudible) on memory. There is ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: (Inaudible) there is a broadcast.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: When I need it is when somebody calls me and asks me a bizarre question about usability and I can't come up with the answer off the tip of my tongue, I refer back to, it's a great reference for people who've been through the classes or people who are pursuing that. There are video clips of usability tasks that you can use to show to somebody to show them what that looks like. The templates part is the key to (inaudible).

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Yes.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: I go into one link on usability central hundred times a week.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: It is and we spent a few weeks with some of your folks customizing it really to our look and feel. There are power point prototyping tools we use to design new applications. There are html prototypes. There are pictures. There are button libraries. Everything you want is there. The only downside of it now is it's on an internet site and I want to share it with the world (laughter).

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: You want it everywhere. Okay. And let's see. The next question we have is how and what did you use other than direct feedback to measure the success or failure of your usability efforts?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Okay. We measure a number of things. We do have a customer satisfaction index that we track that is more of the direct feedback model. So we take surveys. Usability testing is a great piece of that as well that I guess would probably be considered direct ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: That would be considered direct feedback, yes.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Feedback. We also do here resting testing. We developed our own score cards based on some of the Schaffer materials plus some of our older usability testing that we'd done ourselves to actually come up with a score card to measure how well we meet a particular standard. So we can see for each project that how well we know our objectives.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Good.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: So those are a couple of ways. And I mean listening to a customer is a thing. So the direct feedback is ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Most important.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely. But we do look at adoption rates. That's one of the things and our adoption of our e-business functions has gone up tremendously over the last few years and I would love to take credit for all that because of usability. Obviously, there are other things that go into it. So it's probably hard to come up with an exact number ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Number of how of that is through usability.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Exactly.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay, next question. What sort of organizational resistance did your effort meet and how was it overcome? There was none.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: None. Everybody opened doors. No, you know one of the difficulties I think was that our IT organization was very interested in usability because they did a lot of the design early on just by default. Nobody was handling the designs or (inaudible)

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: They were doing it.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Had to do it. So that was a bit difficult because with the user centered design process it's really an analytical piece. It's talking to marketing. It's talking to product development.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: It's going outside of the IT group, right.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: It really is. Absolutely. And so the resistance was from the business side saying you know I don't really want to know about this stuff to develop the application.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Oh the resistance was from the business side, okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: From both sides and (inaudible).

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Yeah, because they were used to doing the work that way. Okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay. So how did you overcome that?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Well, the first round of training that we did, we brought both to the table.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Mainly the business owners and it was just a matter of getting the executives to say okay you're going to go to this class.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Once we got them in for a few days and they really understood what was going into that class ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Why was someone coming in and asking them all these questions.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely. This is and it felt more like product development. Okay now I understand.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: We're developing a capability for my customers. I know my customers. The IT folks got involved as well saying okay well, it's really is encoding html. This is an application development.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: This is something that is different, okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely. That was one of it. And I would say I like to compare this to a quality methodology. If you've implemented TQM or Six Sigma at an organization, it's a cultural thing.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Yes, right. It takes time and it's got to go everywhere, right.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: It does. It really does. And until everybody understands at least the basics of it you can't get very far. And that was really important in this.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: We have a follow up on that question. How high up in the organization did your effort have to go to find a champion to make it work?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: You have to go high enough to get somebody that people will listen to.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Will listen to.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yeah, I mean in our case it was the senior vice president and a director on the board of the company.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Yes.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: I was lucky there.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Because he was there, right?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely. But you really do need to get some you know it's got to be the CIO or the head of e-business. It's got to be somebody that people will appreciate what they are saying.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay, next question. It's not clear to me if Anthem created a usability group or if it distributed the responsibility for incorporating usability among existing groups. Why don't you to answer that one first and then there's another one.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Sure. What we tried to do was centralize the program for management so the championship of the program getting the training curriculum together, getting the methodologies together ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: So you have a group which is a very small group, but that's the group working on the training and infrastructure.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: That's essentially me (laughter). And then we worked within the organization that we had in place already. In our case we have the regional development teams, regional business owners that work on different capabilities. We have enterprise teams that work on those capabilities.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: So that, so you did really distribute a lot of the responsibility out.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yeah, I think it's really important. Because I have seen models where you try to centralize that, work with the development team, pull the design back and push it back out. But this way we have people that are in the trenches day in and day out working with the customers, working with the business users. One thing that we're trying now is to mix that up a little bit. Is to get say a developer in one application to work with somebody from a different part of the company.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: So may be sharing those resources a little bit more so they get some breath, so they get (inaudible).

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: So they are not just working on one ...

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: A follow-up question on that was how do you keep the groups' everyone's knowledge up to date? Are you doing more training or ...

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Oh, great question. We are. We do continue to use the HFI classes. And we as Mary mentioned, I think in the video we stay away from customizing the classes so we can send people to follow ups and public classes. But the really interesting thing that we've done lately is you do need refreshers and as we get more into say usability testing, a lot of people didn't go to that class. But I need pieces of it. So you guys were nice enough to work with me to develop this new product called the usability central.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Yes. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yeah.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: There's got to be a lot of people that don't know about that.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yeah, it's an exciting product. Basically and usability testing is a great example. I had a dozen or more people that I need to give the basics of usability testing to, but not send them out to a 2-day class.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: To the whole 2-day class. They needed to know enough

Mr. Kyle Tolar: To get it their own ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: For their own project, okay. So ...

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Exactly.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: So usability central...

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yes, we worked with Dr. Goddard and he took a portion of 5 different modules out of the existing curriculum. And we've licensed that and our CUAs are now able to go out into the organization and give those classes. You know, they will take 2 to 4 hours a piece. It gives them some visibility. It gives them some leadership. It gives them a great development opportunity. Let's spread the word a little bit more, may be find some other folks who'll be interested in new usability. Get them into, you know pull them into the longer term classes if they are interested in certification, and keeps the word going. Of course we have people (inaudible) came in a few months ago to talk about developing for seniors. So we tried to get interesting speakers ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: To get interesting speakers and keep more training going on, good.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Does Anthem test for accessibility as well as usability?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yeah, actually that was the predecessor to our usability program.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: So the accessibility came first.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: We were very concerned. A health care company, obviously we have to be concerned about these things. We don't follow and there are some of the government guidelines that others might but we need to do justice.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: You knew that there was a ...

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Portion of your audience that might be visually impaired.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Oh absolutely. So yes, we finally see guidelines we test against those. And it is more or less part and parcel that accessibility and visibility ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: So it is all together.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: (Inaudible) as well as multi lingual in capabilities that we are building out now.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay, good. What did it take to customize usability central in terms of time and resources from Anthem and from HFI?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Sure. Actually it was nice from my standpoint. I spent probably 2 days with a couple of the consultants and went through, I just basically printed out every design we've ever done and started pulling pieces together and sort of explained the process. They went off for several weeks, did whatever magic that they could do.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: The customization and ...

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yeah.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: We're talking about customizing for instance the templates and the guidelines.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right. So when we started there were I think 20 to 24 templates.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Yes, that come with usability central.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right. So we started those. They sort of took me through the basics of them so I can understand what they were looking for. I came up with Anthem examples for each one of those. And we sat down and made decisions about which templates we would build out. So again we spent a day, a day and a half and then those guys went off and I pulled off a miracle as far as I am concerned and came back and looked absolutely perfect one and got it.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Good. Okay. Well, this is interesting because this has what skills do you look for when you hire new graduates right out of college, but you, I think this is may be for me not you, (laughter) because you don't hire any correct?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Oh it's interesting because we do obviously bring folks in so. You know there's not one specific thing that I will look for bringing a new person into work on usability. It's more breadth of background than anything.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Yes.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Technical skills are great, but technical skills almost get in the way sometimes.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Yes.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: You want to be more in tune with the user. So I will hire somebody with a psychology degree or a computer science degree or a pretty much anything. It's the ability to really understand the user, interact with the you know with the user and through the computer.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: You know, what I always would say is that because people ask me this a lot, you know, how do I recognize for instance someone in the company or someone coming from outside. And I always said we need someone with a passion for wanting to make it usable.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Rigth.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: I mean that's criteria number one. But I will add that the many people that for instance have gone through certification and the many people that I've worked with and mentored in the field have a broad background. So you can come at this work with a degree in human factors or not, with a background in psychology or business or computers or programming, but I think the passion for it is what makes it work. You have to love it. Let's see what we want to do next. Have you or do you plan on incorporating your usability work into things other than web based, paper based, newsletters, external communications, and that too forget about intranets (laughter) right. What do you think?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely. And I think you know that you've passed some threshold in usability when you start redesigning everything you interface with everyday (laughter). Don't you?

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Like you get in the elevator and you're critiquing the buttons.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay (laughter).

Mr. Kyle Tolar: So there are usability programs we have started reaching out and ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: You have.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: So what are the things that you're doing?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: In fact, we've just started working on a new online newsletter when they pulled me in to work on an online newsletter.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Which was replacing our existing member newsletters that were going out. So they've sort of learnt that we have a background that can help in a number of scenarios.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: You have this expertise that holds.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Interesting.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: The funniest probably one of the most shocking things that we learnt in our usability testing a couple of weeks ago is one of the forms that we used for somebody to buy our insurance directly when I saw people struggling through this form (laughter).

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: You mean it wasn't part of the test? It was kind of (inaudible).

Mr. Kyle Tolar: It was on screen but essentially we took the off line form and put it on screen.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Yes.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: And to actually hear people verbalizing what they thought some of these (inaudible). So I took that video tape and we're going to go back to our ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: And work on the form.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Actuarial department and help them understand what the people ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: What about the intranet?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Intranet has worked out really well for us as well. We've launched usability central for the intranet, started using the templates, started using the methodology. We immediately pulled our intranet team in this.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: You did, okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: So that was almost part and parcel with the internet. So we've actually developed two sets of templates. One internet, one intranet saying essential layouts for different brandings internal and external. So and it's not that big of a difference. Obviously the users are different. The personas are different. The case studies are different that you will look at for the application. You have a little more control over browsers and you know who the users are. Testing is a lot easier because we can do it internally. Intranet I think is the more easy of the two (laughter).

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: I don't know that everyone out there would agree with you (laughter). Some of my clients are really struggling with the intranet. Okay. How do you initially convince executives that there is a usability need?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yeah, if they are dead set against the idea, it's probably hard to get them in the frame. Like I said before, if you can get them listening to a user actually seeing users' interaction to your technology, I think that would be a stunning revelation for them. Reading feedback that comes in from a user. Asking them to sit down with their wives or spouses or sons or aunts and getting them to look at the technology. Again third party research, there is a lot being written about it.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: There's a lot out there now.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely. It appears in the Wall Street Journal. They've started with it.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: They have started paying attention. So does your usability champion as we call him Mark, does he do I mean does he help you informally or does he actually do presentations? Does he have meetings with?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Both. I think all of that is very important. He is you know obviously a part of the senior leadership team. And talks about what we do, talks about usability, talks about adoption. The company hired Mark and we built an enterprise e-business program and a usability program to reach out to our audiences to drive cheaper forms of self service so they are really depending on us getting this job done. And they very much buy into the idea of making it as easy as possible to use for the end users. So and they also have neighbors and friends and sons and daughters that have been using technology and be frustrated with it. So I think once you make that connection, that it's not about what color is on the page, and what graphics do you use.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: That it is deeper.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: That it is deeper, that it really can make a human connection. It's much easier to get across.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay. Alright. How long were you in the planning stage for your usability efforts before you actually you know got them rolling. So how long was it between planning all this and then actually having everything out there ready to go?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Sure. I spent probably a good 6 months before we really kicked off a formal program, had the formal kick off meeting and the presentation. That gave me enough time to get through some of the classes so I could get the basics down. We also we had some consultants in and did some smaller work. But I really wanted to get the word out there a little bit. I wanted to be able to talk about it intelligently to my peers.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Before you really said here we are let's go. Okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yes, absolutely. So and I could see it taking a lot longer. We moved pretty quickly in our company. We had some very serious adoption goals over the last few years and we had to make sure all the barriers to the adoption were out of the way before (inaudible).

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: And that had happened before. So you're saying that it might take other longer than that. Yours was probably a best case.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Oh I guess, absolutely. If we are coming in challenged already about web development, about adoption you know.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: You don't have all of that work to add.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Exactly.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: And then you throw usability into it. And it will take longer.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Right.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Have you encountered any opinion war (laughter) situations when deciding among different user interface design changes for an application interface. How do you manage these? You don't have any ...

Mr. Kyle Tolar: (Laughter) No, all the time should one be on the left or on the right. Is red really bad? Is green really bad? You know we tried to work it through. In worst case, you know, get three users and independently ask them and you can usually come up with consultants through testing. And we go back to HFI like frequently for an expert opinion or send it off shore. Those things get personal. So if I designed a screen.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Yes.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: And one of my peers designed a screen and we have differences of opinion, we could fight about it all day. But by the morning one is probably slightly better than the other, may be not. So we tend to try to send it to an outside ...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Do you find that having a standards in place and you know that for some of these questions the standards say does that help?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: That absolutely helps. And now we should have a standard to go to. Now we still have people that come back and (inaudible).

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: I'll go back to the standard.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Sure (laughter).

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay. What special considerations if any do you have to keep in mind to address the needs of such a diverse population as you have? For e.g. America has different nationalities you mentioned possibly language. So what are you doing to deal with diverse audiences?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Sure, several things, you know. One nice point about our industry is that we do really only function only within the United States. So we don't have to go outside of our borders necessarily to sell quite a bit. But we are very concerned within our borders about the different communities. And almost a year ago we launched our first multi lingual offering on the anthem.com.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: You did. And what is that, what language is that?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Spanish.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Spanish, you have it in Spanish. Okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Absolutely. And today our two most trafficked portions of our website are health offering and our provider directory are both in Spanish. We're looking at other languages. We're also we've got a very large project going on right now about opening up other service channels in multi lingual capabilities.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: So how challenging was that to add the Spanish?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Very (laughter) much more. Particularly, I was also responsible for that and I speak you know like a hundred words of Spanish...

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: You're not fluent.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: (Laughter) So it was very difficult to get that going, but luckily good partners on translation stuck well. External partners (laughter) that helped.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Us with doing out a design from plus HFI obviously.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay. Alright. Last question we have here. Are your usability people well in you I guess based in IT, communications, e-business, combination? Where are you within the organization?

Mr. Kyle Tolar: I am in the e-business program which is outside of our IT organization.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: It's outside of IT.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Yes.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: So you have your own e-business group.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Correct.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: But we have people that work in all of those areas and have been through various pieces of the training, have been certified. Most of our CUAs are on the IT side.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: Several of them have been on the business side. Some of them are in marketing. Communications department is also a matrix aligned to each of these functional areas. So they've been with us as well.

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Okay. Good.

Mr. Kyle Tolar: So I think it can happen from anywhere, really. The importance is to get that program established and get it going.

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