About the Authors

Cheryl L. Coyle, Ph.D, is a Technical Manager of Human Factors Bell Labs Research, Lucent Technologies. She can be contacted at coyle@lucent.com

Karen L. Ziech is a Performance Technologist, Information Products & Training, at Lucent Technologies. She can be contacted at karenziech@lucent.com

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STC UUX Community Newsletter
Usability Interface

Case Study: Promoting Usability at Lucent Technologies

By Cheryl L. Coyle and Karen L. Ziech, New Jersey Usability SIG

Human Factors (HF) has enjoyed a proud history in Bell Labs, dating back to the 1940s. As happened to many telecom companies during the downturn from 2000 to 2003, many HF experts left Lucent or were re-assigned to other functions. In 2004, an idea sparked in a small HF group to create a community of other “usability-minded” individuals within Lucent. We formed a Usability Special Interest Group (USIG) with a common purpose: to promote good usability in Lucent products.

Our new group struggled with how to achieve this goal. We discarded the negative ideas that positioned us as “usability police” and focused instead on education and communicating the value of Human Factors. We recognized a good idea when a member suggested sponsoring an award to raise awareness of the importance of usability. Instead of focusing on what projects had done wrong with regard to usability, we decided to reward a project for doing things right!

A Usability Award

Evaluating the usability of many interfaces would have been impractical, given that we were a group of volunteers, so we solicited information on how teams had used elements of user-centered design by asking these straightforward questions:

• What makes your product usable? Identify the main advantages of your product for its end users.
• What did you do to make your product usable? Tell us about any user involvement, user testing etc.
• Send screenshots or pictures of the main usability features of your product.  

We received 39 nominations, which were evaluated in three rounds by panels of USIG judges. We looked for submissions that did not emphasize cost cutting or new functionality, but did emphasize features such as hiding complexity from users and providing validation and status. We also looked for evidence of user involvement or usability reviews.

The first round of judging reduced the submissions to 11. The second round, based on a two-section, Likert-scale instrument produced five finalists. The top five teams prepared a 10-minute presentation for the judges and participated in a 20-minute question and answer session.

USIG announced two winners, three runners-up and six honorable mentions.

To spread word of the success of these teams and to further raise awareness of the importance of usability, we invited the 11 project teams and their managers to an awards ceremony. The two winning teams were awarded trophies and all 11 teams were given certificates.

Over 100 people attended the ceremony, spreading the good will of the award. Some Lucent leaders followed up with inquiries about increasing product usability and building the right processes into their development. This was exactly what we were hoping to achieve.  Everyone felt good about their contributions to the usability of their project, and will increase their attention to usability going forward.

Final Remarks