I’m afraid we don’t have money for usability!
July 18, 2010
Last week I heard again what I hadn’t heard for a long while. It comes in different versions. Sometimes it is something like “Huum, you know, usability is important, but we need to focus on different things at the moment”. Other times, “I know usability is core, but we need to focus on development now. Later on, we will spend with usability”. What about, “I’m sure our software developers can have a look at our usability issues”? This post is not to discuss whether usability is important or not. I hope we are all convinced that it is important. What I would like to bring here is my concern about how much we, usability professionals, are prepared to work in situations where usability is not in the budget of a company, which by the way happens everyday, everywhere.
I am about to conclude my professional doctorate in User-System Interaction in The Netherlands. During this almost 2 years, I never had the need to convince anyone about the importance usability. They teach that! Most of the time I was in the university, people there know what they can get from usability activities. However this scenario of the dreams always annoyed me. This is not real! Now I am doing my internship and – for many reasons – usability has its space in my project. This is not real again. When I heard last week someone saying that the budget of a certain project has to be directed to development, sales, marketing and everything else, but usability activities, I thought: “Wow! Here we go back to reality!”. Working in a context where everyone is aware about how important usability is, money is always available, recruitment is done smoothly and time is not a problem is a really boring workplace. In October I will get my brand new degree and I will be back to the market. Maybe the meeting last week was a sign that I am approaching the times where usability has to fight for its space. I look forward to start fighting again! \o/ For the teacher, instructors or anyone who teaches usability, my message is to think about this. Teach people how to deal with situations where usability is not the most important/valued/focused thing, because we all know the value of it, but we also know that we need much more than that to have a product!
