Session conducted on Saturday, March 20, 2010, at Huawei Technologies India Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore.

1. yoUX
Usability, User Experience,
Interaction Design…
Technical Communicators & User‐experience design [OR]
Conquering the world 101
By Suman Kumar
Saturday, March 20, 2010

2. Agenda
∗ Why should you care about UX?
∗ What is UX?
∗ UX RoI
∗ Does it matter to you?
∗ What’s in it for you?
∗ Career option
∗ Hands‐on exercise

3. What is UX?
∗ The desired, expected, or actual experience of a user
interacting with a product, especially as it relates to
the design of the product's user interface. [Source:
Wikipedia]
∗ The quality of the interaction between your product
and your customer

4. Cost Justifying UX
∗ IBM, along with several other companies, state that for every $1 invested in usability testing on
software, the payback is between $10 and $100.
∗ The cost issues related to usability are well documented. For example, Sun Microsystems has
compiled this useful list:
∗ Usability engineering has demonstrated reductions in the product‐development cycle by over 33‐50%
(Bosert 1991).
∗ 63% of all software projects overrun their budgetary estimates, with the top 4 reasons all related to
unforeseen usability problems (Lederer and Prassad 1992).
∗ The percentage of software code that is devoted to the interface has been rising over the years, with
an average of 47‐60% of the code devoted to the interface (MacIntyre et al. 1990).
∗ Ricoh found that 95% of the respondents to a survey never used three key features deliberately added
to the product to make it more appealing. Customers either didn't know these features existed, didn't
know how to use them, or didn't understand them (Nussbaum and Neff 1991).
∗ 80% of maintenance is due to unmet or unforeseen user requirements; only 20% is due to bugs or
reliability problems (Martin and McClure 1993; Pressman 1992)
∗ Design changes due to usability work at IBM resulted in an average reduction of 9.6 minutes per task,
with projected internal savings at IBM of $6.8 Million in 1991 alone (Karat 1990).
∗ Clean, cutting‐edge UI design cuts McAfee's support calls by 90%

5. Does it matter to you?
∗ You are already a UX pro if you perform any two of
these tasks:
∗ Audience analysis
∗ Task analysis
∗ Scenarios
∗ Personas
∗ Renew your STC membership every year
∗ What separates the best technical writers is their UX
design skills

6. What’s in it for you?
∗ UX skills can help you:
∗ Get ahead in your tech writing career
∗ Prepare for a career switch
∗ Improve your people skills
∗ Acquire vital insights into the product development
process
∗ Figure out how your wife’s brain works
∗ Build extremely effective mother‐in‐law repellents

7. What do UX folks do?
∗ User research
∗ Requirements design
∗ Prototyping
∗ User tests
∗ UI reviews
∗ Establish, evangelize, and enforce UX standards and
UX design itself

8. UX Design as a career option
∗ You are in a great place (to move to UX design)
∗ Read about UX
∗ Volunteer:
∗ Your product
∗ Intranet site
∗ Corporate website
∗ Elevators, doors, your cafeteria’s buffet design…
∗ Build a personal brand: blog, tweet, network, and connect
∗ Do it only if you are interested and passionate about it.

9. Preparing for the UX job
∗ Start with your strength:
∗ Documenting UX standards/guidelines
∗ Error messages…
∗ Prepare an ‘elevator pitch’ on why the management
should give you UX work
∗ Speak in numbers
∗ Make friends with developers, testers, and product
managers, pre‐sales guys, support folks… you know?
∗ Never critique a product. Help build it instead. Which
means, “don’t ask questions, if you don’t have answers”
∗ Be prepared to be the one‐person UX army

10. Recommended Reading
∗ Books
∗ The Elements of User Experience: User‐Centered Design
by Jesse James Garrett
∗ Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
∗ Designing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen
∗ Handbook of Usability Testing by Jeffrey Rubin
∗ Emotional Design by Don Norman
∗ Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping by Paco Underhill
∗ Phantoms in the Brain by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran

11. Recommended Sites/Tools
Sites Also useful…
∗ Reading ∗ MS‐Powerpoint (yes!)
∗ Useit.com ∗ MS‐Visio
∗ Uxmatters.com
∗ Ixda.org ∗ Google Docs
∗ Smashingmagazine.com ∗ MS‐Excel
∗ uxdesign.com
∗ HTML from W3C
∗ Prototyping Tools
∗ Balsamiq [paid] ∗ Google Search
∗ Flair Builder [paid] ∗ Beer
∗ Pencil [☺ ]

12. Thanks people! ☺
Questions?
∗WWW: http://sumankumar.com/usability
∗T: http://twitter.com/sumank
∗@: sumank+stcsig@gmail.com