Creating Usability-Driven Corporate Strategy (initial version)

Transcription

1 Creating Usability-Driven Corporate Strategy (initial version) Juha-Antti Huusko 1 1 Helsinki University of Technology, juha-antti.huusko@tkk.fi Abstract. The abstract should summarize the contents of the paper and should contain at least 100 and at most 200 words. It should be set in 11- point font size and should be inset 1.0 cm from the right and left margins. There should be two blank (12-point) lines before and after the abstract. This document is in the required format. Keywords: We would like to encourage you to list your keywords in this section. 1 Introduction Usability is successfully integrated into an organization when a strategy is developed which leads to key usability benefits and supports overall business objectives (Bloomer 1997). But then, how to develop a strategy that leads to key usability benefits? This essay tries to give answers for the question by discussing, what would happen if the user-centered design methods would be used as part of the strategic planning process? The essay focuses on strategy work of companies which develops products for consumers or businesses. When a company develops it's strategy regularly, it's called strategic planning. One common and simple definition for strategic planning is that it's a process through which a company determines what it seeks to accomplish and the actions required to achieve desired outcomes (Hitt 2003). Strategic planning as complete process is mainly practiced in big and middle-sized corporates. Instead, the owners of small companies can usually survive just by making decisions that follow entrepreneur's own principals (Näsi & Aunola 2001). Following the principals provides consistency that is enough to take the company towards it's goals. There are ten slightly different schools of strategic thinking (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand & Lampel 1998). They all have a different definitions for terminology, which consists of terms like strategy, strategic planning, strategic management and strategic leadership. Furthermore, all schools emphasize more or less different factors as key elements of strategies (Näsi & Aunola 2001). For instance, one widely used model includes following key elements and phases: 1. Strategic intent and mission, 2. Situation analysis, 3. Statements of strengths/weaknesses and opportunies/threats, 3. Strategy formulation and implementation plan. In practice the strategy work is done by analyzing external, general, industry, competitor and internal environment of the company. From basis of analysis, there will be conducted a synthesis where there are produced different strategy alternatives and

2 evaluations of those alternatives. (Hitt 2003). Because of limited time in use, this essay only focuses on analysis methods that are usually used as part of strategic planning, regardless of what school of strategic thinking a company follows. There is a huge list of different strategic analysis methods too, for instance lifecycle analysis, value-chain analysis, Gap-analysis, Decision trees, Profitability analysis, scenario planning, PEST-analysis, stakeholder analysis and risk analysis. Näsi and Aunola conducted 2001 an empirical questionnaire which was returned by 125 Finnish big corporations. According to results of empirical study, clearly the most often used strategic analysis techniques in Finnish corporations are SWOT-analysis, competitor analysis and customer analysis. Thereby, in this essay we look closer those three. Moreover, the scenario planning technique seems interesting from the usability researcher's point of view. Let's find out, has the strategic scenarios anything similar to scenarios of the UCD process. 2 Analyzing methods Before going any further, let's imagine there would be a team of usability specialists as part of the strategy planning workgroup. What kind of information could the usability team produce when analyzing different environments of the company? How can this user data be used when addressing the strategy for the company? For example, does the user data help when positioning the company and it's products to the market? On next chapters I shortly review the three selected strategic analysis methods and connect them with suitable UCD methods. 2.1 Competitor Analysis and SWOT Competitor analysis is a complex field, where are numerous questions to be answered - depending on which strategic school you are following. For example, competitor analysis finds answers to questions like who are the competitors, how the products of a company are different from competitors products, what are the weaknesses and strengths of competitor's products, what are the prices of competitor's products, how profitable is the business of competitors, etc. (Reference). One technique for comparing a company against it's competitors is SWOT analysis. SWOT comes from words Strenght, Weaknesses, Opportunies and Threats. It is a technique which can be adopted to almost everything, and among other techniques, it's often used as analysis tool of competitors. Moreover, SWOT analysis can be done on many levels, for instance, one can examine the whole company or only company's products. It is easier to start with product SWOT, and if there is noticed something remarkable, it can be presented in corporate level SWOT. See the SWOT diagram below. SWOT analysis for product is filled so that for example into cell "Strength" will be written the product characteristics that are strengths when compared to competitors. Usually there is also added a note if the product characteristics affects only some particular user groups.

3 Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats Without doubt, an usability evaluation would be an efficient tool when a company wants concrete information about weaknesses and strengths of their competitor's products. If there is a wide range of competitive products, their usability can be evaluated by using expert evaluation. If there can be addressed couple of main competitors, it's possible to involve genuine potential customers and to arrange usability test. Usability testing with actual users reveals concrete usability problems and good practices that seems to work well. (Benyon 2005). A company can learn from test results when setting directions for it's own product strategy. When evaluating competitor's products, the company should evaluate it's own products by using the same evaluation methods. Companies often ask their customers to fill a satisfaction questionnaire to find out the strengths and weaknesses of their products. In the majority of these questionnaires it is hard to see how any usable information could have been obtained (Benyon 2005). Questionnaires tell only opinions of customers and the results don't expose how well the product attends the customer in a context. Customer's real behaviour as user of the product can be studied only by usability testing where customers, as actual future users, actually participate in testing situation. 2.2 Customer Analysis Customer analysis as it's understood in strategic planning means that after analysis the company knows better it's current customer base. It's about recognizing the key customers and also potential customers and their characteristics. This information helps the sales department in finding new customers. The most important thing is to create an action plan, how the different customer groups will be served in the future. (Henrikki Tikkanen). User research techniques, like interviewing and observing the users, can expose needs of customers. This may help a company to aim it's strategy to certain customer segments. When we consider user research as a tool of strategic customer analysis, it requires continuity, because also the strategic planning is a continuing process. When a company is planning it's strategy, many different possibilities have to be considered. Still the strategy must be addressed in given time scale, so that the

4 company can function properly. It's not possible to apply user research techniques to all possible customers at once. That's why a user research could be conducted as ongoing process at background, always trying to find a new potential customer group as a target. If a company acts on Business-to-Business field, it can dress these user research activities so that they actually take their customers as associates. 2.3 Scenarios Scenarios are widely used technique in strategic planning (Näsi 2001). Strategic scenarios are tools for ordering one's perceptions about alternative future environments in which today's strategic decisions might be played out. In practice, scenarios resemble a set of stories, written or spoken, built around carefully constructed plots. Wilkinson (1995) said the purpose of scenario planning is not to pinpoint future events but to highlight large-scale forces that push the future in different directions. It's about making these forces visible, so that if they do happen, the planner will at least recognize them. He continued: Scenario planning derives from the observation that, given the impossibility of knowing precisely how the future will play out, a good decision or strategy to adopt is one that plays out well across several possible futures. Wilkinson also pointed out that each strategic scenario should diverge markedly from the others. In addition to strategic planning, scenarios have been used in human-computer interaction work for many years too (Benyon 2005). In HCI work, scenarios are stories about people undertaking activities in contexts using products, that usually represents some new technology. But it's important to notice, that scenarios can be written at multiple levels, from many perspectives and for many purposes. In this sense, scenarios are a crossing point where strategic planners and HCI practitioners share the same technique. Obviously they create scenarios from different perspectives, but the reason for creating scenarios is the same - both want to depict the future. After scenarios have been created, strategic planners and HCI practitioners utilize them slightly different ways. Strategic planners create scenarios so that they can more easily analyze, how would the company survive in the future, if the world turns out to be like described in the scenario. If the management strongly believes that some particular scenario will come true, the corporate strategy can be addressed so that company will be successful in the future. But leaning to only one scenario is a risk for a company, what if something else happens? That's why the companies usually have to leave some other gates open too. HCI practitioners have a different situation, because when designing interactive systems there can eventually be only one scenario. That is because HCI practitioners exploit scenarios to describe a future use situation, where people undertake actions by using the new products. In interactive systems design there are four different types of scenario: user stories, conceptual scenarios, concrete scenarios and use cases (Benyon 2005). During the design process, the scenarios are modified so that use cases are the scenario, that "will come true". There can be only one scenario in the end in order to design logical and usable user interfaces. There will be no back doors after that, so if the aim is to develop usable product for certain user group, the preliminary research work has to be done well.

5 Preliminary research is important in strategic planning too, it definitely can be understood when getting to know all those different strategic analysis methods. When compared to that, we as HCI practitioners should be graceful that usually in our work it is possible to make user research and analysis and, in principle, we don't have to guess so often as in strategic planning. 3 UCD and Creating Competitive Strategy Porter (1984) wrote that there are three basic strategies, how a company can win it's competitors: 1. Cost leadership, 2. Product differing and 3. Focusing on a specific customer segment. A company can achieve cost leadership by careful management (where all costs will be minimized) and well defined inner processes. For example, if a company utilizes IT-systems, it's cost efficient to design the interaction between IT-systems and employees so that every day tasks can be accomplished as smoothly as possible. User research techniques can be adapted also here so that the needs and requirements of the employees are explored by conducting interviews and observation. When a company focuses on improving some features of a product, it is called product differing. If the product differing is done successfully, it may lead to higher profits per product (Porter 1984). How the competitors would react if the some company publishes a product that more user-friendly and better designed than their own products? If the user-friendly products would became popular, would the competitors try to copy the product concept? Is it possible to tackle this beforehand by developing a product family where there is a product for all price categories so that competitors can't find a segment for their products? Stabilized products that have already become popular may have achieved already some customer loyalty, which makes it difficult for competitive products to conquer land. Top and bottoms (features/price) of a product family are the most vulnerable places where competitors can hit, so it's important to make sure that the product family is strong trough the line (Porter 1984). The last of the Porter's basic strategies is focusing on a specific customer segment. Here a company can use the results of customer analysis. As described in a dedicated chapter before, the user research techniques can produce valuable user information, which can also be used when evaluating users as potential customers. For example the different use contexts of products can reveal need for a special product, which serves a specific customer segment. 4 Summary So, did we learn any new tricks, how to create a usability-driven corporate strategy? I think this topic needs a bit more extended study, before any concrete advice can be given. However, the management who decides about the corporate strategy most likely would benefit, if they had some well presented user research results available, for instance when making decisions about taking over new customer segments. Or if there is a need for cost savings, conducting user research

6 by interviewing and observing employees could reveal some concrete improvement proposals. In product business, where competitor analysis looks like to be a central tool of strategic planning, I would actually be surprised if the usability evaluations of competitor's products are not used as part of analysis. Moreover, usability evaluation results could produce ideas for differing company's own products to be more attractive. If noticed that customer's needs and features of the competitive products in the market doesn't meet, a company can set a goal of it's own products so that they would better meet the needs of customers in some particular segment. Usability is one key character of product and it can be either good or bad. If by usability testing is noticed that competitor's product suffer from bad usability, it is definitely clear sign for strategic planners too, that there might be a good change to hit. If a potential business opportunity is found by using usability research methods, it is likely that the same methods are highly valued in the company when it starts to follow it's new strategy: developing products that are more userfriendly as other products on the market. The most promising communication tool between HCI people and corporate management appears to be scenarios. Especially in big and middle-sized corporates where scenarios might be a common tool for strategy work, HCI people could try presenting the target state as form of a scenario. When a concept of scenario is familiar for the management, it is a facile and compact form to adopt information. Furthermore, by referring to scenario, HCI people can effectively address for management, where the "UI strategy" fails (or will fail in the future). References Tekes, projektiopas: Benyon, Turner & Turner (2005): Designing Interactive Systems. Näsi, Juha & Aunola Manu (2001): Yritysten strategiaprosessit - yleinen teoria ja suomalainen käytäntö. Porter, Michel (1984): Strategia kilpailutilanteessa. Bloomer (1997): Strategic Usability: Introducing Usability into Organizations. Conference publication. Hitt (2003): Strategic Management. Mintzberg (1998): Strategy Safari.