Built for Use: Driving Profitability Through the User Experience By Karen Donoghue
	Have you wondered why so many dot-com enterprises have disappeared from the Internet while others continue to amass a large and loyal audience? The situation is reminiscent of the pun, ‘dot-com today, dot-gone tomorrow’. If you want to understand how satisfying the user experience contributes to profitability of enterprises that use the Internet as a customer relationship channel, you want Built for Use by Karen Donoghue. Donoghue describes how successful user experiences deliver a firm’s value proposition – the brand promise – to customers in the most effective and appropriate way.
Usability, revenues, and profits	If you are a usability advocate, you will be happy to know that usability is now linked to revenues and profits as never before: The value proposition is diminished if a customer cannot engage in the full brand experience because of poor usability. However, to convince decision-makers, you need the facts to justify usability efforts and resources. Donoghue explains the importance of understanding and satisfying users’ expectations by using case studies of corporations for which she has provided consultancy, and that produced profitable returns on user experience. Donoghue wrote Built for Use because the Web has made usability and the user experience a business issue–cutting across business strategy, design, and technology–and nobody had written a useful, practical book about the subject. There were no business books that successfully linked usability with profitability on the Web and as a practitioner, and it was the book she often found herself searching for when she visited the bookstores. Another reason for writing Built for Use was the common request she heard from audiences at her lectures. Audience members would come up afterwards and ask whether there was a book that she had written or books that she could suggest.
The core of the book	Built for Use consists of three parts:     1 - The Case for the Customer Experience is the framework on which the book is based. It describes why understanding what customers want online is critical to success, why a gap between what customers want and receive detracts from user satisfaction, and how poorly designed products cost firms lost revenue. Donoghue describes how to present a defensible business case for defining a successful user experience and why trust (security of personal data) is essential for branding and for customer loyalty.     2 - Strategic Experience Envisioning presents strategies for identifying what customers want in the user experience. It describes how to mesh the business model with the interface, and presents guidelines for driving online strategy efforts by organizing and effectively managing multidisciplinary teams. It concludes with a suggested model for defining, developing, and measuring ongoing user-experience success, and recommendations for maintaining the model as a central part of an organization’s business strategy and culture. What I like most about “Strategic Experience Envisioning” is that it describes how to define the Experience Matrix. The Experience Matrix is a tool to help in strategic planning. It involves mapping business goals and user goals to the features and to the user-experience mechanisms that satisfy these goals.     3 - The Future examines why satisfying a new generation of consumers will involve delivering global, mobile, and intelligent solutions. The chapter begins with an explanation that although technology evolves at breakneck speed. Humans do not. Bridging the gap requires simplifying complex designs. Donoghue contrasts how the Shakers’ 1 craftsmanship, known for simplicity and admired for excellence, should serve as a model for companies to create successful user experiences.
New design challenges	While Donoghue provides a variety of examples to justify her conclusion, I can offer one from my own experience related to cell phones and portable data agendas that offer access to the Internet. These devices present platforms for a multitude of services, creating new user experience design challenges. Meeting these user needs and satisfying business goals at the same time requires understanding how these new mobile and global platforms impact the user experience. Understanding this makes or breaks the opportunity to produce profitable returns on investment. Donoghue argues that in the post dot-com world, pervasive computing will require a different way of thinking about the design of successful user experiences because design features will be invisible and more integrated. Think of using an E-Z Pass to pay for drive-through fast food, and you get the idea. Nevertheless, firms continue to be under increased pressure to deliver returns on investment in technology, with shorter development cycles. Donoghue describes the need to better understand how usability impacts the business case, before things are designed, and that firms need to focus more effort and resources on the experiences and interfaces that will produce measurable value. The chapter concludes with a picture of a child wearing oversized headphones and audio equipment (circa 1960) for producing audio stimuli. The child is shown wearing rabbit ears to subdue fear of the equipment. The devices are oversized and bulky when compared with the dimensions of the same equipment today. The caption reads, “If technology doesn’t seem like magic, it’s probably obsolete.” It’s apparent from the picture that the equipment depicted is obsolete when compared with today’s technology advances in science and medicine.
For more information	For the latest information, resources, and insights about Donoghue’s user-experience strategy, visit www.builtforuse.com. 1 See www.crinsy.org/not-for-profit/shakerwv/ for information about the history and origin of the Shakers.
	About the Author: David Dick, a senior member of the Belgium Chapter, is a Senior Technical Writer with the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications in LaHulpe, Belgium. By his efforts, the department of Worldwide Networks earned ISO 9001 certification. Back to top