STC Usability SIG Newsletter
Usability Interface

Book Review
Built for Use: Driving Profitability Through the User Experience
by Karen Donohgue

Reviewed by David Dick

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.

If you are a usability advocate, you’ll 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. To convince decision-makers, however, you need to 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, which produced profitable returns on user experience.

Karen Donoghue wrote Built for Use because the Web has made usability and 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.

Built for Use the consists of three parts:

1 - The Case for the Customer Experience is the framework for 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 loyal customers.

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 proposes 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, involves mapping business goals and user goals to features that contribute to the goal, and 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 design. Donoghue contrasts how the Shakers’ craftsmanship, known for simplicity and admired for excellence, should serve as a model for companies to create successful user experiences.

Donoghue provides a variety of examples to justify her conclusion. I can offer one from my own experience. It is that cell phones and PDAs offer access to the Internet and a platform for a multitude of services, creates 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 and make or break 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 they 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. She 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 wears 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’ You need only to examine the picture and realise that the equipment depicted is obsolete when compared with today’s technology advances in science and medicine.

If you find Built for Use insightful and educational then you will be delighted to know that Karen Donoghue also lectures. Her speaking events are published at www.humanlogic.com/builtforuse/speaking_events.html. For the latest information, resources and insights about Donoghue’s user-experience strategy visit www.builtforuse.com.