August, 2003 – Meeting the Demand for Usability Expertise: An Offshore Model

Dr. Eric Schaffer: Hi! I am Eric Schaffer and I am the CEO of Human Factors International. And I'd like to welcome you to this next edition in our series from HFI's usability broadcast network. This session is going to be meeting the demand for usability expertise using an offshore model. And it's an area that I've been personally working in for about 4 years and I'm really excited to share with you a lot of the insights we've gotten, a lot of the ideas we have, and how we see off shore involvements supporting the ongoing institutionalization of usability. So this is an area that I'm just very, very excited about and thank you for joining us.

The last one we had, the last broadcast was on standards and I think you'll see that this continues to fit as a big picture into a methodology for institutionalizing usability and making your usability effort mature moving from the old days of usability being kind of like being in a garage and doing coding in machine language with no methodology and no tools, no documentation, no quality assurance, and hoping something good happens. Well, that's not the way to do usability today. Today usability should be a professional, mature, institutionalized process, and that's what this is all about. I'd like you to notice there's a button for submitting questions and at any time I'd like you to go ahead, when you have a question put it in and at the end I'll be answering those questions live. And we have questions coming in already before we even started. So I'm very excited to hear what you've got. We're going to answer as many of those questions as we possibly can as long as they are not off context I will take them on.

So let me go in and talk a little bit about this topic first and we will take in questions at the end. If you look at what's happening today, I'm really excited to be in this field. I've been doing usability for 25 years as piecemeal usability, usability that's been brought in here and there as experiments in an early adapter mode. But now companies are realizing that usability is the key differentiator, the key competitive edge. Everybody can get hardware, everybody can get software. You just buy those things. I mean, coding, yeah, my kids can code an html. We can send it to Estonia or India and it's very much a commodity. But the differentiator is the ability to build practical, useful, usable, and satisfying applications. Not very many companies do that well. Some companies work at that by bringing in a consultant, hiring somebody, and saying go up, do good work. Hoping something good happens. But that's a very immature way of doing usability. What we want to do is a mature usability engineering effort and that involves institutionalizing usability, making it a routine part of the way that we do business. And I've got a book that's going to be coming out in think in January and I've just plugged our book. So our marketing department feels very happy. But that book is about making usability part of the main stream development effort within a company. And this is a chart from that book. And this is something I've been working with, with many clients now for about half a year. And you can look at where you are in this process. And if you look, first you need a wake up call and until you've got a wake up call where the organization says yes, usability is important, we want part of this, then you really you are definitely just in the very beginning stages of doing usability. Even if you have standards, if the organization hasn't really embraced usability, if you don't have an executive champion, you're just starting. But then, once you have an executive champion and they have a strategy, we open a whole new page of usability. It's a whole new page, because now we've moved from piecemeal usability to managed usability. And managed usability means that we're organized. That we're looking at the big picture within the organization and we're sorting out what are the steps. It doesn't mean we have everything together yet. We're not done. But it means at least we are proceeding with some level of resources to set up a really efficient usability operation and make it part of the organization. And the first thing you need to do is you have to have your infrastructure set up. And that means, you know, you have to have a methodology, you have to have tools and templates to support the methodology. You've got to have training to – you'll need all that stuff. If you don't have that, you don't have your factory. You're not very far along. Once the factory is there, you need people to work in it. And I've seen a lot of companies these days where you go in and you say, do you have training in usability, yeah. Do you have standards, yeah. Do you have methodology, um hm and it's integrated, that's good. But not very successful, why? Well, if you look, you'll find the problem is that they've gotten may be half a percent of their development organization doing usability work. Give me a break. I mean do you know pretty much we agree in the industry that 10% I mean it depends on circumstances, it could be 12%, it could be 8%, but 10% of the development community should be working on usability. To be doing usability engineering. And yet what you find is often very different.

Now I want to try an audience survey. And what I'd like you to do is just check off the percentage of the development organization, your development organization that are doing usability engineering work. That are trained to do it and do that work today. If you have this huge great factory set up, what's the point if you don't have staff to work in it. And yet that's what we see. But you know what, you can understand why. You can understand why because it's hard to get qualified, quality usability staff. They are very few and far between. Sure, you can get a few people who understand something in the field, who've read a book or something, but to actually find somebody who really understands the field more, wrapping up the survey now, so go ahead and finish up. That can be very difficult to do, particularly if you're may be in a small town or in a large area like San Francisco they are sitting like that, they are at least very expensive. And that's a problem that we began to face and one of the potential solutions to it is having offshore support of usability engineering. Can that work? Now we've seen a huge amount of success, billions of dollars of success in offshore work in the coding area. And we've looked at that, but coding is different. If I have a specification I need to write the code. That's one level of endeavor and you can do that offshore. But can you do usability work off shore? And what can you do? That's something which we've been investigating at HFI for about 4 years. And I want to share with you many of our insights today.

The idea of an offshore remote organization helping with the usability effort allows us to envision having a really sustained usability engineering group. If you have consultants in the US, they are usually too expensive to think about them doing all the work that you need to do. I mean think about what 10% of your organization would be doing usability work. It's an awful lot of money. And it's almost impossible to find that many staff. So an offshore organization can be the key to really allowing that to happen within the organization, if we can make it work. Also we can envision that off shore organization having a somewhat different flavor where many of the usability consultancies that we have in the US and I've been working in as a consultant in the US for 20 years. And most usability consultants are used to coming in, working on a project, getting done, well it's done, that's really great, and going on to the next client. That means you get very good at learning new domains and I've worked in everything from working in bond disposal to factories that make flour, grind flour and telecommunications, finance, worked in so many different areas. It's a great deal of fun, but I don't know really in depth any of those areas. A sustained group can learn the domain, can learn the conventions, can support the standards of the organization. And that can allow us to really move ahead in institutionalizing our usability effort.

I'm wondering something. As you look at doing usability in your organization, how mature is your operation? If you look at these choices does your organization do nothing, or does it just do occasional projects, or has it transitioned? I am really wondering about this. How many people now have transitioned to having managed usability where there's an executive sponsor who has a strategy and is proceeding to move forward to institutionalize usability? With that in place, have you got an infrastructure? And that means you got a methodology. It means you got tools and templates to support it and you have standards for the user interface. And do you have 10% of your operation doing work in usability? Okay, and finally, if you have all of that, has it become routine for the organization where everybody knows it's there and accepts that's important. We have just a couple of seconds and I'd like you to go ahead and pick one of those that represents where your organization is and that's something you're going to return to later.

Okay, so let me cover the way that I want to proceed in terms of talking about our experience in doing usability off shore. And there are some things that you want to look for as you think about doing usability off shore as you talk to an organization suggesting they can do it. Let's see if some of these things make sense to you, okay. First thing is we want to make sure that as we look at doing usability work off shore we have a reasonable range of services that are going to be providing. This is the Schaffer methodology, right. It's HFI's user centered design method. And this is something which we have used as our foundation in doing the work in our office in India and we'd experimented to see which of these things can be done effectively in an offshore environment and which can't. And we've gotten some interesting results. When we bring people in and train them, select the right people, train them, give them the right infrastructure, and we talked about some of the things that they can give.

One of the first things that we experimented with and was definitely a success are expert reviews. And it's fun. We've actually had a service for years now in the company, go on our web site and get it I think today. And it can be 7 at night and you're done with a design and okay I'm tired and you upload it and by 7 a.m. the next day you've got that design critiqued in terms of it's ergonomics. And it looks at everything from branding, and navigational structure, and detailed design, not in the kind of depth as if you were there and really into the domain, but looking at it with fresh eyes and looking at it based on the usability engineering literature. You know, why waste a billion dollars worth on literature. And this has been tremendously successful. It's absolutely routine today for us and this is really a great way to give people feedback about usability, partly because it is impersonal. I mean it's hard to sit down and somebody say okay, look I looked at your design and let me start by saying it sucks. And that's not a very easy thing to have to break to somebody, but if you can say look I sent this to this objective organization, they don't know you, they don't care and they've sent this back based on their systematic review. And they are giving very specific feedback that tells you what are the things that could be improved in the design. There's a real value to that. And that can be done entirely offshore. Another thing that we've been working on is a process we talked about in HFI as user interface structure project. And user interface structures are something I think HFI is well know for, because we think that 80% of usability is a function of the goodness of the navigational structure of the interface. I should be able to come to the page and go okay I understand that I'm in the right place, I understand what I can do, I can find things and I can navigate physically efficiently. And we've developed a systematic methodology to be able to go about going from an initial design to a revised design that allows us to find things more easily that reflects the user's deep mental model of the domain. And that's something that we've discovered we can do with the offshore group, but we can't do it entirely off shore. In order to do user interface structure, you need to do data gathering with stake holders within the organization and with users and it's a type of data gathering that you just have to be there for. And so as much as we've been able to train staff to be able to do that work, we haven't been able to have them do it entirely off shore. We need to send somebody or two people from the office to work for 3 or 4 weeks generally in order to do one of these projects and they have to work on site with actual users and with actual people in the business. That's not an impractical thing to do. You know a flight from India to the US, you know it costs may be $1800. So it's not that much more than coming from California. So this is something that I've been very happy with what's been done, but it can't be done entirely off shore from what I've seen.

Graphic treatment is something that's terribly important particularly in the web world. I've seen so many designs particularly in internet that are just ugly. And many of the graphics that I have seen have really degraded the quality of the design. I mean we've had cases where the graphics just confuse the user, they don't know what they can click on, they don't follow good ergonomic practice. And what we've found is that the graphic work can very definitely be done for the most part off shore. In some cases we like to have creative staff in the US partnering with the off shore group in order to have more creative ideas and to get a little different perspective. And that's worth while doing for the very high end applications, but the graphic work is very high quality.

We've also found that we can train staff off shore to do standardization projects. There's a huge amount of work to do once you make standards decisions in terms of building the site to show the standards, documenting the standards, providing prototyping tools, and reusable code, and all those things and the team is wonderful at doing that. But in terms of making the standards decisions, again that can't be done off shore. That has to be done, and we in many cases had staff again travel to client sites from India and work with the client staff and in many cases teaming with HFI US directors in order to make the standards decisions and then that team can carry forward and instantiate the standard into the tools and do the work of making the standard ready to disseminate. So standards are something that can be supported off shore, but we've not been able to find that is a 100% off shore activity. You need to be there.

Detailed design is something where requirements gathering is often done by business staff and by systems analysts type staff. And they are getting to the point where many of them can design some personas, design task flows, scenarios, and do initial screen mark ups, but depending on where they are and as long as they have some level of requirements, we've found that that can be sent to the off shore group. And that off shore group can systematically follow the standards, follow good ergonomic practice, and do very good design working with the graphic artists on it. And so detailed design is I think something that's one of the most exciting areas for the off shore work. I can't count the number of times that I've developed the user interface structure, handed it off to an organization to do the detailed design, and come back and looked at it, and sort of like okay I think I remember kind of whether you are following what we talked about, but it can be a very dangerous part of the design process where a very high quality structure and a very high quality standard can be degraded by detailed design work, designing hundreds and hundreds of pages that just aren't so good. So one of the areas that I'm very excited about in the off shore area is detailed design, and that's something which we've seen a lot of success with.

The next thing I'd like to talk about is prototyping. And prototyping is something which for a long time in our industry we've kind of tended not to do it except in the most critical projects, because prototyping was expensive. We would do paper prototyping and low fidelity kinds of prototypes and that's acceptable. It only loses a little bit, but what you find is that if you can use the off shore usability team to do prototyping work, and get the cost of prototyping down, then it becomes worth while to do prototyping in many more instances. You still don't have to do it all the time, but prototyping allows you to get very high fidelity results when you do usability testing. And so I've seen a lot of success there.

I'll share another little success now and I've seen a lot of work being done in terms of attempts to do remote usability testing. And we've all seen the web conferencing tools trying to be used and we've all seen various specific usability surveys and some kind of usability testing methods that people have been trying to use. And uptill now I haven't been personally very satisfied with the results from them. We get some survey results from large numbers of subjects. That's good, but in terms of actually doing the simulation trials remotely, I haven't seen a lot of success. But in the last 4, 5 months, we've been working on it here and I think we've really had a break through where we are now able finally to do remote testing where we can sit in Bombay and have people doing tests with the subjects here in Iowa or in Boston or San Francisco or wherever and get results that I think are comparable to the results we get when we're physically there. And that's something that I'm really proud of. I'm really excited about, I hope we will do a web cast just on that topic soon because we've found that we can do virtually every kind of testing. The only thing we can't do is the kind of in depth data gathering and contextual (inaudible) and in depth interviews that you need in the user interface structure phase. But when it comes to usability testing, can people use it well? Do they like it? How do they perceive it? Those are all things that we can now do remotely and that has significant benefits from a cost point of view. It also has benefits from a cross-cultural design point of view. I can sit in Mumbai and without ever spending a nickel on air fare test France and England, Brazil and the United States, and a couple of more places all in two weeks and have the results. And that's something that is going to allow us to begin to meet the challenge of cross cultural international kinds of design. So many of our applications are being used world wide. And it's not the case that you could just design it, test it in the US and hope everyone can use it. It just doesn't work that way.

Okay, so we talked about the idea of the range of services that you can have within an off shore group, what works entirely off shore, what kind of things we've seen work successfully may be with a little bit of travel. Now I want to talk about what is I think one of the secrets to making a off shore group work effectively. I'll admit HFI US has some of the most skilled and creative usability staff on the earth I would think. And they are a joy to work with. And they do things their own way, they are experts. And they understand user centered methodologies and they understand our methodology, but they go in and they create whatever is necessary often in very critical situations. In a routine environment though, there's a real value to say okay we have a standard methodology and we follow that methodology. It's a different way of working, not piecemeal, managed. Not cutting edge, mature. And that means one of the things we're very excited about is getting ISO certification. What does ISO certification mean, who cares. It first of all sounds really good, but beyond sounding really good, ISO certification means just this, if you look at it, it says that you have a process, we have the Schaffer methodology. People are trained on that process. They do the work following the process and they document that they've done that. They get feedback on that process. And they improve it. I know this because the training they get includes ISO certification training and the CEO had to get it as well. So this way of operating, this more systematic, mature methodology is something that's been a key success factor in the coding groups that have worked off shore successfully and I think it is going to be a key success factor in the way that usability teams work off shore as well.

I mentioned that you have a process and then you train people on the process. And that's something that I mean I'd like to really almost challenge you on that. Think about your organization. Even if you have a methodology, does your training really specifically teach you how to do that methodology? Or is it kind of sometimes it overlaps and sometimes it's there and some pieces you need to go and ask somebody about. Because that's the way it's been most of my experience. You need to have the training and you need to have the staff to do that work, and do that work effectively. And so we found that we can find in India where our off shore organization has built up in Mumbai or Bombay as it used to be called, we've been able to find people masters level people with usability engineering degrees and experience and bring them on board. These are a few of the staff. And those people need to go through a training program. Now getting a masters degree in usability is a good thing. But you need to have training beyond that so you know really what the procedure should be, really how to use the tools, really how now in our case HFI does business. And so you know when I got my doctorate they told me and it was a clean shave back then, that you know this is the license to learn and that's certainly true of any degree in usability. We bring people in and we have training and that training has been standardized using a tool very much like what you are experiencing right now. And using this methodology in small groups facilitating people there taking the staff through exercises we were able to get the top staff from HFI directly giving that training to the new staff that we have off shore. And they get a set of training this will give you the training plan just to give you a feel for it and it takes everything from the underpinnings and cognitive science through the entire set of tasks we do, expert reviews user interface structures, detailed design work, prototyping, branding, graphic libraries, all of that and there's specific training in that. At the center of that training is HFI's well know set of courses that are specifically geared for the US market and support certification. The staff in India are getting certified and certification means that they pass a standardized test that's very difficult that proves to us and proves to everybody that they have a core understanding of this field. We no longer have to worry okay you know I've got somebody here and may be they have a degree in history, may be they have a degree in library science, but do they understand the basics of what you need in terms of methodology, in terms of detailed design principles, in terms of the basic cognitive psychology that you need to understand to do good user interface design, do they have that? Well, now you can know for sure and that's something that's been pretty widely accepted here in the US and overseas and it's something I guess we better eat our own (inaudible). So we're doing that.

Another secret in the staffing area that we've seen that's very important is having integration between off shore staff and staff that live in the US, grew up in the US, and have that full understanding of the US culture, the full expertise in the field, and can work together often blended with teams doing usability work off shore and here in the US. And so being able to put those things together I think has made a huge difference in our ability to deliver and our ability to culture the off shore environment. So this has been an important success factor.

Another area that I think we need to look at when we're doing work off shore is the ability to manage the team. I'm going to tell you, you can't just you know show up in Mumbai and look around and say okay you know you build this organization. I hope it's going to work. It's not happening. It really takes people there to culture the organization, to grow it, to make it real. It's easy to just hire people and put them out there, but it's another thing to really make a cohesive corporate culture and a cohesive organization that's able to bring people up and get their skill set in place and make sure that when they deliver it's really the kind of quality you want. That's why I spend most of my time today in India. I live in Mumbai. And I come and I visit the US regularly, but my main residency is in India and I am there to make sure that operation works. Apala Chavan is somebody who we were so lucky to get from the very first days we were there. And she was when we first came to India almost 4 years ago, she was probably the only operating usability consultant there. She's been trained in London. And she's brilliant and she's our managing director who's building that organization. We've also added Dr. Sushmita Rao and she's now quality assurance and ISO certification, and training. And so we have the staffing there working together with the management team guiding them. And without that, I think that you're not likely to see the kind of off shore group that you want.

The off shore organizations benefit from being systematic. They also benefit from having a solid infrastructure and tools. Part of it is getting the physical infrastructure and space there. And I'll tell you that it's a lot harder to do off shore than it is in the US or even in Europe. There are no incubators and you need to be able to get the office space and the computers even things like connectivity and electrical power are not as simple. For e.g. when we first started our office there, we found that power would go out pretty regularly a couple or three times a week. And you know you're working on a critical project and all of a sudden it's well yeah, the power is out and it is going to be out for the next couple of hours and we're going to go out and have tea. And that's all we can do and it's a helpless feeling. And so what we've done there and it's a good example may be of what you need to do is we have a power generator that runs the lights, and the computers, and the air conditioning, and everything else. And it's great big unit and you need to have it there even though in the US you may not need it. Without that you won't be able to be reliable.

We also use our own tools. Usability central is the tool set that HFI uses that we've built and we share with clients, customers, and which we use in India as well. And usability central ensures that the methodology is supported. This is the tool which takes people through the process and gives them the tools and standards. It means that when they are building a usability test, if they need a demographics form, they don't start from scratch. They have the form there and they just need to customize it. It means if they are developing a standard, they don't start from scratch, they start with a Vanilla standard and then they customize it to the branding requirements and the conventions of the client organization.

Another area, which I think is very important to look at in off shore operations, is communication. I think if you ever talk with somebody who has worked with an off shore group, it's the area which will make or break the process. Bad communication is catastrophic. Good communication can actually be more efficient than working all in the US or all on any one location. For e.g. one of the capabilities is to have 16 hours per day work on your project. Because you can work all day here you have your wire frame done, you send it and while you're sleeping, it's graphically to use prototype is there the next morning. And so if you want to work fast, you can set it up to do that. And it really is effective. We can on the other hand get overlap which helps in communication so you can talk directly, because you don't really want to do all your communication by email and so you want to be able to talk by phone, you want to be able to web conference. And so being able to have the team working overlapping, having meetings, is very important. And in cases we can even have that we've set up we have teams that will work routinely overlapping until noon in the US. And that means that you have time everyday when you can talk, and communicate, and conference, and do design together. We have to have the tools in order to communicate effectively. One of the really cool things that we set up and I think it really shocked me is you can for e.g. you can walk up to a phone in any air port and dial an 800 number and it bounces to my cell phone or to the team lead's cell phone if you're working with the team. And that makes communication very, very easy. And it's not very expensive. It costs like 31 cents a minute to have that connection. You can talk an hour to India for under $20. And so that means being able to do conferencing is very inexpensive really and not a big factor. I thought gee, it would be $3 a minute and you couldn't talk, but it's really a relaxed thing. And to add to that, the ability to use web conferencing tools with web cams and the ability to draw things together and share displays it makes it pretty easy to work collaboratively. And so that's worked very well.

We also found that it's important to have a very organized method of communication. That's why we have an extranet that we use where you can go in and you can see what the set schedule is, when they are on, when they are on vacation, when you can look at the projects that are happening, and you can download files so you can see work in progress or you can see completed deliverables. And the download is actually from the server in the US. So it doesn't take a long time at all. There's virtually no lag at all and you can pick up the files or even set it up so they automatically download. So being able to have that kind of extranet is again another important piece. Doing off shore successfully means more attention to communication, more attention to organization, and with that I think we've found that it's very, very practical. It's also inexpensive. I was talking with a client recently in Huston, Texas and he said these off shore rates, they tend to (inaudible). And I think that was the way they might see it in Texas, but really the advantage of off shore is not just in the rates. It can make the difference between being able to do usability and not on many projects. It can make it practical to do a usability, but really what we want to look for in an off shore team is the quality of work, creativity, ability to communicate, ability to deliver on time those are the things that make an off shore team that can really connect with us well.

So how can you set up an off shore team? What does it look like? What are the structures? How does it fit with an organization? What we found is that we have what we call a CE lead a center of excellence we call our off shore team centers of excellence so a center of excellence lead is generally a masters level of usability specialist who serves as the primary point of contact and management for the whole team. And they have the knowledge that allows them to keep track of all the kinds of work that happens within the organization. And then within that team working for the CE lead we have usability staff, graphic staff, documentation, and technical staff who do prototyping. And all those staff work together. We have senior staff level and just staff level and so we can put together an organization with that that fits lots of different types of situations within an organization. For e.g. here's an organization that has UI design, graphics, and prototyping capability all in one team and you can see the rates are very competitive. By the way, again I'll remind you that there's the submit question button and we've been getting a lot of questions, but I hope you'll share more of them with us. Here's another team and this is really focused on graphics and prototyping. There are not as many usability staff, but it's really designed to fit in that way. That lets it work effectively with colleagues on the US side playing whatever role you need in order to make the organization work well. And I think that when you look at setting up the usability organization, you need to look at what the US side organization is doing and how that organization best fits in. And it will vary you know for one thing, as an example, sometimes you'll have usability team reporting to a central usability group helping with standards, working with that group to disseminate usability through the organizations, supporting the standards. Sometimes you'll have it working for specific project teams. In virtually every case, today you should have the off shore group reporting to or working with a usability specialist on the US side. That can be somebody one of HFI's usability directors. It can be somebody who is an internal hopefully a certified usability analyst, somebody with the set of skills and that allows that team to communicate effectively with the main project group or a central usability group. And it sure makes that usability specialist powerful in terms of their ability to get work done and fulfill and exceed the expectations of the organization. Only in very mature organizations where project leads understand usability intimately can you think about having an off shore group that reports directly to a project lead.

The thing that we found that's very, very effective is blending US staff with the India staff. And that's something where they can play a number of different roles. They can mentor or manage the group. They can do project work. And they can even work full time with that team and thereby getting a truly blended international global solution. So I think that that's been something which we've experimented with a lot at HFI and it can be done. It takes some special expertise on the part of the directors to do the communication to bridge that gap really effectively and I think our team has been really growing in the ability to do that. I'm really proud of them for that.

Some of the most common activities that we've seen groups do in the start up if they are working for a central group, developing standards and that really means customizing usability central taking the Vanilla standard from there and setting it up with the internal branding, internal conventions, internal needs and screen types represented and also expert reviews and a cool insight. Expert reviews can support dissemination of a standard. So if you have a standard and okay, we've got the standard and that's very good and now we want people to use it, everybody use the standard and hopefully we give them some training to do that, but will they use it? Well, are we going to have enforcement? Not the e word. Well, what you can do is you can say what we're going to do, we're just going to send all the new pages being designed to this expert review service that we've set up with our off shore group. And when it comes back it says look, you don't need to use the word day you can say received, or signed, it's obvious that December's a day. And we want to left justify it. And we have insufficient contrast and by the way, you use this kind of form here and aren't you really reinventing the wizard and we have a standard wizard and that wizard works a little differently and let me show you what that would look like. You might think about just following the standard. And then your developers have the responsibility to decide whether to follow the standard or that sure is different than just this flood of screens going out may be some follow it may be some don't. And so the expert reviews allow you to get your standard out there and get it followed.

Another thing is teams that specifically support project teams. And that's something which I think the detailed design work is what I've seen most of the organizations that are working with our centers of excellence that's where they start using the team. In many cases we have clients that have 50,000 pages that need to be reworked ergonomically with wording changes, and some content changes, and following a new standard, and that's pretty overwhelming, and that's something where the center of excellence can just grab that, grind through it, and be very, very effective. So that's something that I've been very happy with.

So where are we heading in usability? We are headed towards mature usability engineering. We're headed towards usability engineering that's no more something done in a garage. It's not piecemeal. It's not something done by early adapters as an experiment. We know that usability engineering is worth while. The numbers are there. You are going to double sales. Is that worth it, may be. You got a triple function usage. Is it worth it? Is it worth building? I mean it's almost silly to talk about ROI today. Talk about ROI it's like do you do the ROI for bringing in a professional data base developer or do you just hire a high school kid? It makes no sense to have an unprofessional data base developer. The costs are ridiculous. And the costs are even worse for having somebody unqualified, unsupported, without a tool set, without standards, going in and trying to do your user interface design. It negates the value of your application and it means that you're probably doing it over again. So people realize that and that's great. And now it's time to do it right. Managed usability with an executive champion working with a strategy, the infrastructure, the staffing, and full integration into organizations. That is where we are headed with usability. And the future I think for many of us is right now. At least we are moving in that direction.

So thank you. What I'd like to do now is take questions and I'd like to mention that we have a white paper on our site that you can download now, which covers this topic in some more detail. Okay, so what have we got? Okay, oh! Surveys. Okay, so let's see what we've got in terms of surveys.

First of all, we have the audience survey for what percentage of the development organization staff are doing usability? And we've got, oh my goodness! 8% are 10% or more. So 8% are where they should be, congratulations for that. 30% are 1 to 3% which is very sad. And 62% are less than 1%, which is way beyond sad. It doesn't matter whether you have standards and methodologies and all of that. I mean having a methodology with 62% I mean for 62% with less than 1% your methodology is fiction. It's a fantasy. If you have less than 1% doing usability, how can that be something which is successful. And so one of the things that I think we're going to see as usability is really integrated, we need these numbers of staff in there doing the work.

How does your company address usability? 6% in the end of all days of nothing, very sad. 60% doing piecemeal projects. But now we start to see 11% with executive champions and strategy. 17% have gone beyond that to infrastructure. 6% are there in staffing. I guess we have 2% with no executive champions, anyway. But you get the idea we're starting to break out in to more mature usability. And that's really, it's super to see that. Alright let's see what I've got.

How hard is it recruiting and retaining quality talent in countries like India where there is no formal training program?

Actually, first thing I'll say is that in India we are getting formal training in place. There are a number of institutions that are setting up formal training. Many staff also go particularly to the US and get degrees there. We found that we can get great staff there and they stay with the organization. That's not a trivial thing. We have to do recruiting and screening and not everybody becomes as good. But that's true in any environment. So I'll say that after 25 years in the field, I've worked with a lot of new staff, a lot of very experienced staff in the field. And the team that we've built so far in India is really a pleasure for me to work with. They are not just incredibly good at learning things and many of them have very good foundation, but they are very creative and able to grasp some of the most conceptual and tricky parts of our field. So it's a joy for me to work with them and I think we've had a lot of success.

In your white paper I hope you are not recommending that companies exploit cheap overseas labor where there are plenty of usability people looking for jobs in the US.

Okay. A couple of pieces of that. One thing I'll say is that good usability people in the US today are very hard to find. And as we move forward making usability routine, as we go to take these numbers, we have 8%, we have 8% right now that have enough usability staff of the ones watching this. So the market of need in terms of usability is vast. Also it's not at all the case that we're finding that we just wipe out the usability staff in the US and throw it all off shore. It's effective teaming between the in house or the HFI US staff and the off shore group that makes the best solution. And so I think that this is something where we're taking advantage of the benefit of lower cost in India. That's a good thing, because we're going to provide our customers with better products. I mean we like being able to get good deals here in the US and that's how we get them. And this industry is no different. But I don't expect this industry to be a place where look let me put it simply, both my sons are going into usability. And I didn't call them up when I saw this and say don't go into the field. Okay, both of them are going there, and both of them will have plenty of work to do. So if you are thinking about doing usability work and this is making you a little nervous, don't be nervous. Because this is a huge field and this off shore work is just going to supplement it and make you as a usability practitioner in the US more powerful and more able to deliver and exceed the expectation of your development teams.

Next question. How do you convince the powers (inaudible) at a company that a usability department is important to the development of practical, useful, and usable applications? I want to convince the management at my company that usability is important.

Well, first of all they need to have their wake up call. A wake up call means that people at the top level in the organization get it that usability is important. How are you going to do that? We found a lot of things that are effective. One of the things is doing expert review so they can see the benefit of doing usability work. Another thing is educating them, giving them seminars. It's usually best if you don't do it internally, but you have some external person who's giving them insights into the value of usability and into the role of usability in the organization. So we need that wake up call. Yes, usability is a differentiator, usability is essential, and depending on your type of business, the reason for that will be different. It may reduce the call time. It may reduce the number of support calls. It may increase sales in an e-commerce site. It may save lives. I have talked to an organization like that just the last week. And so depending on what usability's role is in the organization, the executives need to be educated about that. Once they are educated, then we're ready for my book which I'm plugging again, which will be out in January and that book really talks about what you do at that point. How do you institutionalize it? How do you develop a strategy? How do you go forward? And the off shore solution is just a part of that picture.

We used an off shore company in South America to help us with a project, but found communication difficult. Even with language problems overcome it was still a problem with understanding our issues. How have you overcome this?

It's a good issue. First of all, I think that it's very important that we picked a place where English is the primary language of communication. Without that I think it would have been very difficult to get to the place that we've gotten to in this time. Usability work requires that you communicate effectively, that people understand the subtlety of the language, and that's very important. Another thing is the infrastructure of communication that we've talked about already. Things like the ability to web conference, telephone, the ability to have an extranet. In many cases we recommend when you start your team the CE lead come and spend 2, 3 weeks with you just working side by side so you can get the trust in the relationship and know each other. And I think that's a good thing to do. The last thing I'll say is that there are cross cultural issues in working with an off shore organization. We've identified these and we specifically trained people on those issues. They are just differences in perception, differences in communication, but you are not going to know what I mean if I say yes, yes, it will be done. And so our staff, because we see our requirements as that of communicating with the customer. Our staff are trained how to communicate in a way that will make sense to a US customer. And that's critical. So cross cultural training is as critical a part of what we do as training in how to do remote usability testing or standards development. And so yes, that's something that takes serious attention and I think also having me there, having somebody there who really knows the culture in the US is important because it helps that communication. And if things ever do get snarled up, in the end you call me.

How difficult was it to find people in India with the interest and aptitude for usability work? We found that people in that country to be more interested in learning to use specific tools e.g. photo shop than in learning the more abstract e.g. usability methodology.

I'll say that I believe that India is uniquely suited to do usability work. The staff there in some ways they get it better than American staff. In India, when you meet somebody, you have to know who that person is before you can say hello. Because if they are Hindu you say namaste. If they are Sikh, you say satshreyakal. If they are Muslim, you say salam walekum. You have to know who they are to know what they want to eat and how to communicate, and what their value system is. And they are totally used to understanding who their user is and understanding that they are not them. That's not something we have in the US. We have to make those buttons up and know the user they are not you. We have a culture there which is oriented to service and the hospitality. And we have staff there that are some of the most creative and subtle that I have had a chance to work with. And it's a billion people. Not everybody is going to be good at usability engineering, but the people who I have had the pleasure to work with I think they're just great. I think they're really, they've been a joy for me to work with.

What language problems have you experienced? We find that just understanding what the off shore person is saying is difficult to impossible to understand due to the accent.

That's something which takes attention. We've given people accent reduction training. It was funny I was on with the American Express and I called them I had a client. Now we've given them a plug too. And I talked to the customer service representative. And I was having a conversation about somethings about my account, I wanted to change and check on. And it was a great conversation. And towards the end I suddenly realized by some little tiny inflection that they might be in India. And I started talking in Hindi just to find out. And so they finally oh yeah, yeah, we're in India. And then and it was just some little tiny, and then they transferred me to somebody else. And I started talking to this person and the connection was terrible and I was having trouble understanding and I started talking about India and they said no, no, we're in Texas. So there is an accent. And if we don't specifically train, we don't need to eliminate the accent, there's an accent there. Most of our staff, particularly all the CE leads are easy to understand. And so that has to be trained for and selected for and it's important. And sure, you can easily find people in India who you can understand if you don't if you aren't really used to the Indian accent. So we I think we've been able to deal with that. But if something where for e.g. when we do remote testing, we select specific people to facilitate that who have good accents and are easy to understand.

Oh, more. I thought we were done. Okay. Now this is the last set of questions we will do. I guess they're kind of looking tired. He says yes, I am definitely looking tired. Can you address how to manage cultural differences in graphic design? Example, how deep are your standards? If you give (inaudible), but then cultural differences off set global usability. How do you address this?

In graphic design, there's a real need to communicate effectively. And that's something that web conferencing I think is very important form. It's also the case that our CE leads do a very good job of making sure the connection is made. I have a – in terms of graphic design, we have and cross cultural issues, we have a very strong expertise. In fact Apala Chavan is one of the world's experts I think you'll see her at many conferences presenting papers on the issue of cross cultural design. And so if you tell us we'd like a design which is graphically treated to fit in a Japanese environment, we can do that. If you say, oh no, no we want to go to Singapore, we can do that and it will look different. If you say US, we have data on that and we know the colors that work, the types of patterns that work, which use pastels, which use brighter colors, which expect more cartoons, which expect more clutter on the page, and so we're definitely able to fit in to whatever culture you need.

What kind of backgrounds do your Indian staff have?

The usability staff generally have masters degrees in usability from US institutions or masters degrees from the institutions in IIT, NIIT and places like that. The design institutions in India or the tech institutions in India with a specialized in usability and shown great interest in it. So that's been very successful for us selecting from those groups. We have a about a 4-hour selection test that we give people and then I personally interview them in the process as well. So it takes attention to get the very best.

How do we handle the non availability of usability professionals in India?

You can give me a call on that. The, it is interesting, Jacob Neilsen I think published that we'd need about 60,000 usability engineers in India in the next few years. And he may be right, even though I think he shocked everybody. And we're working very hard to meet those kinds of numbers. And that's why we have this scalable training program. That's why we're working with institutions to set up usability training undergraduate and graduate programs. So that's something which we are working very hard on.

Oh my God! Another question coming in. Okay. So what are the key functions to be done in India and what in the US?

I think that depends on the organization and I kind of need to talk to you in more detail about that. Clearly, the India operation is best at large scale routine development. They are wonderful at doing expert reviews, structures, standards, detailed design. If you want to do some kind of very culture specific design, you may want to spend more time here. You may want to use more US staff with that group. And I think also if you are doing piecemeal usability, that's something where somebody just comes in, does a project and leaves, that's something where you get less of the benefit of the sustained group knowing the domain, knowing your standards, working with that long term relationship and I think the piecemeal work tends to be more valuable from a US point of view.

Okay, I got one more last question. Okay, this is really the last question. Don't send any more, but you can give us a call if you have any. How do you manage changing client requirements in such a model?

We have a project tracking system and management system that's very effective at managing client change. Because they change all the time. Priorities change, schedules change, requirements change, and that's part of what we do. And so we are very used to working with clients which have chaotic development environments where it isn't just standardized step by step and where everyday new ideas come in and changes get made. And part of our job is to maintain the tracking of that, maintain the stable base that the client can work in as they deal with the chaotic nature of what they are doing. And so the extranet has the projects there. And we move the projects. They change in priority. We keep track of the changes we make. And I think we can provide the document trail and the project management in many cases to keep an organization on track even through some chaotic winds.

Okay, that was the last question. Thank you so much for joining us and I look forward to seeing you next time.

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