I am saddened to hear so many colleagues discuss the pain and difficulty of finding work, and their doubts as to whether they can continue as usability professionals. We are a caring and competent profession that adds real value to technology development. Yet for the two decades I have been in this field, there has always been an element of struggle for recognition and frustration that we are not taken more seriously. Part of the problem we face is most likely the recessionary economy.

There are fewer projects in development and that means less work for us. That issue will resolve itself as the recession eases and will reduce some of the pain. I do not believe, as some have suggested, that our work has become irrelevant because programmers have learned how to design usable interfaces. That just isn’t the case. True there are more models to imitate, but every day I see miserably-designed products fielded. And user frustration is hardly a thing of the past.

At the core of the problem, I believe, is a truth we must face: we have failed to establish our value to the business community. And if we want to survive and prosper, we must correct that. I doubt that there is a member of this profession who does not believe passionately that the work we do is a major facilitator of success in technology development projects.

How many CIOs and CEOs would agree? With a few exceptions, most do not even know we exist. There is a delightful and engaging naiveté in our profession.

We want to make the user experience a better one and we feel that business should recognize this as a worthy goal. It doesn’t. Business cares only about the bottom line.

Business people, for the most part, care only about their compensation and job security. User comfort is way, way down on the list, if it even makes it at all.

There is no corporate officer responsible for business/technology integration. There is no budget line for it. As a result, we are organizationally marginalized and must constantly fight for attention and funding.

I believe there are areas that we have consistently failed to exploit, to the detriment of our profession:

1. We have not made the case for usability’s return on investment (ROI). With few exceptions, we do not have a convincing set of analyses to convince the businessperson that user-centered design saves money. And the sad part of this is that I believe we actually do achieve huge ROI. But where are the studies?
   
2. We have not assembled a body of best practices and communicated them to the business community in a convincing way. Where is the "bible" of usability facts and practice that we can cite?
   
3. We have not made our role clear in the requirements gathering process. Most technology projects fail in the requirements stage. And this is where we excel. Yet we have not distinguished our contribution here in terms of value, process, or deliverables.
   
4. We have not studied or reported on the cost to business that poor usability creates. How many person hours are wasted each year as a result of poor user interfaces? How much do businesses pay in lost functionality and increased development costs because of poor requirements gathering?
   
5. We have failed to create alliances with our "natural partners." Who are they?
   
6. CIOs (yes, surprisingly, CIOs have a lot of pain around their business clients and we can mitigate it.
   
7. Product managers (we can help them succeed).
   
8. We have not enlisted the help of the universities. We should be conducting many studies showing our value, and these are best accomplished at universities.
   
9. We have not demanded our due from the methodology people. For example, Company X’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Capability Maturity Model has been widely touted as a solution to development problems but has little to say on best practices around usability. That just cannot work. Object-oriented methodologies often see the user interface as the tail of the dog, to be considered at the very end of the project rather than correctly as a formative process in the beginning. That’s just plain wrong and we have failed to confront it.

So what should we do? It’s not going to be an easy problem to solve. I had a taste of that back in 1997 when I tried to interest the profession in launching a PR/Outreach effort to demand better software usability. You can see the remnants of that attempt on our Web site .

I received some support, but not enough to really get it off the ground. What I learned from that effort is that creating awareness requires a huge sustained effort. Not one article, advertisement, speech, or paper, but hundreds or thousands are necessary to even begin getting people’s attention. Our profession has always had problems creating sound bites that convey our value. And (sorry) what we do is not exciting or sexy to the media; that makes media exposure a struggle.

If we were willing to make a serious investment in our long-term viability as a profession, we might encourage the key societies in this area, such as SIGCHI, UPA, STC and others, to create an initiative to jointly promote the value of design to business. The stumbling block is money—a great deal would be needed. If 10,000 usability/design professionals each contributed $100 a year (or the equivalent in their country’s currency), we would have $1 million to begin working with—not a lot for this type of effort, but a start.

I doubt that such an effort could succeed with volunteer labor. That sort of shoestring operation is tough to pull off. It would be necessary to hire a dedicated and very savvy staff to drive it. With staff resources and some cash to work with, we could do such things as:

• Hire MBA consultants to help us make the business case and introduce us to key CEOs.
• Create a public relations capability.
• Lobby the foundations to fund productivity research that quantifies the cost of poor design and the benefit of usability. The recipients could be both HCI departments and business schools.
• Work on SEI, Rational, ACM, and other programming-oriented associations to pay more attention to the need to educate programmers and programming managers in usability.
• We could also use our spare capacity in usability labs to create benchmarks and metrics that could be used to quantify best practices.

Perhaps with this type of sustained effort, we could raise our visibility and the perception of our value. It would be tough to launch such an effort. It would require passion, energy, dedication, and a great deal of management and business finesse. But it would be a heck of a project. If someone could come up with a viable funding model, we could make it work. A Consumer Reports of software? A Zagat survey of usability? Anyone have a good idea?