Usability Article

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Allocating Your Time: Career Advancement vs. Company Profit By Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D.

I had an interesting discussion with one of the participants in my recent usability conference during a break. As is often the case, this participant was the only user experience professional in his company. The company obviously cared enough about usability to hire somebody and to fund his trip to a professional conference. Still, just one guy. And he was supporting a number of development projects.

His question was simple: How should I allocate my time across these many projects in order to best further my career?

The answer is less simple.

There are four obvious strategies:

1. Divide the available user experience resources (i.e., your time) equally across all projects. If there are 12 projects, each gets one person-month of effort per year.
2. Spend everything on one project and let the others fend for themselves (which, after all, they have done until now).
3. Select one champion project and do what it takes to make it shine. Keep other projects on a restricted diet of only the most important usability work.
4. Allocate resources according to each project's money-making potential. If one project accounts for half the company's revenues, it receives 6 person-months per year; the other 11 projects share the other half of your time.

Equal time

The first approach, equal time for all projects, sounds fair, but is the worst solution, both from a personal perspective and with regard to company profits. If you spread yourself too thin, you will never achieve the kind of impressive results that look good in a portfolio and will help you get a job at another company. Even if you stay with your company, you're not going to position yourself well for promotion if you run from project to project.

For a company, there's only one advantage to the equal-time approach: it's easy to manage, so your boss can take it easy. No need to think about user experience strategy.

Shareholders will be less happy. When there's a severe limit to the number of usability improvements that can be made, it's a waste of money to give as much time to a minor project as to the company's main breadwinner.

All on one

Spending all your time on one project's usability will really make it shine. It’s good for your portfolio. And good for the company if that project is the only thing that counts.

In the more common scenario, a company has several design projects at different levels of importance, and the top-ranked project doesn't outrank the other projects sufficiently to warrant their total abandonment.

Champion project gets disproportionate effort

This is a good compromise solution. The champion project will look good in your portfolio, and the disproportionate attention this design project receives will send out a message to the company: "You could get the same level of quality if you invested more in usability, so we could hire a few more folks."

The champion-project strategy is a good way of advancing the company's level of usability maturity to the next level.

Of course, it means that all the other projects are left in the shadows. You can justify this approach by claiming to be influenced by what's best for the company in the long term, namely a bigger investment in usability. In essence, you're misallocating the current investment in order to get a more appropriate investment in the future. This is not as thin an argument as it sounds, but it's still a bit iffy.

ROI

Allocating resources according to the expected return on investment is a happier approach for the bottom line, and thus the choice that's probably best for the company. Yes, management will have to actually articulate ROI and make some hard calls as to prioritization, but that's why they’re making the big bucks.

This is the approach I recommend most often, because the important projects receive the most improvements, but the other projects aren’t abandoned. If a project accounts for 10 percent of revenues, it gets 10 percent of the usability resources. That's still more than a month's work per year, and it suffices for one or two rounds of quick user testing plus several rounds of fast design reviews. Not a lot, and not what I prefer, but enough to make the product substantially better. If a project generates 10 percent of revenues, you can't let it slide.

If you're a hiring manager, don't just look at a candidate's portfolio. Maybe it showcases a few great examples that came about at the expense of many abandoned projects. If the candidate worked in an environment with too-few usability resources (true in 99 percent of cases), ask them what they did for the less-privileged projects. Achieving a decent improvement with minimal resources is as important as doing great work with lavish resources.

About the author

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D. is a principal of Nielsen Norman Group. He is the founder of the "discount usability engineering" movement, which emphasizes fast and efficient methods for improving the quality of user interfaces. Nielsen, noted as "the leading expert on Web usability" by U.S. News and World Report and "the next best thing to a true time machine" by USA Today, is the author of the best-selling book Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity, which has sold more than a quarter of a million copies in 22 languages. His other books include Usability Engineering, Usability Inspection Methods, International User Interfaces, Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, and Prioritizing Web Usability. Nielsen's Alertbox column on Web usability has been published on the Internet since 1995 and currently has about 200,000 readers. From 1994 to 1998, Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer. His previous affiliations include Bell Communications Research, the Technical University of Denmark, and the IBM User Interface Institute. He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easier to use.

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