Can I have some usability please?

I was recently talking to a friend of mine who also works as an Information Architect and he was going crazy talking about a recent project proposal he had seen that had been drawn up by the company he works for. The proposal was for a rewrite of a web application that was already live. Now this project had been estimated and it was huge, with many thousands of man-hours. A large amount of these hours where for requirements gathering and in particular Information Architecture related tasks. So at first glance this seems normal, but then my friend pointed out that in this initial proposal clearly stated that any improvement to usability and been deemed out of scope, this meant that if the client wanted any improvement to user experience they would have to have to pay extra!

Now I understand this type of practice with regards to a base proposal that offers the bare minimum, maybe based on the Must, Should, COuld, Would approach that can be used in conjunction with some form of DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development Method).

However as I am sure you can guess that that type of approach was not what I have an issue with, my issue was around the fact that “usability” was seen as some form add-on some form of optional item. I do realise that you can different levels of effort with regards to usability, whether it be the use of an Information Architects knowledge, usability reviews, usability testing and so on. But the problem that this proposal really emphasised was a complete lack of understanding of the knowledge and experience an Information Architect brings to a project. The fact they had planned a large amount of time for Information Architecture work to be completed but at the same time they had said “improved usability” was out of scope? What did they expect the Information Architect to do….. sit and copy field and page layout from the current app to the new Visio based wireframes? Now I could be completely wrong in this opinion but for an Information Architect to do there job correctly I believe improved usability is implicit, it’s a given. I can’t imagine working as an Information Architect on a system and not always considering usability and the users motivations and their level of technological understanding and so on, all the things I see as fundamental parts of the Information Architecture process in this day and age.

Jim

(Must, Should, COuld, Would) A priority checklist
Dynamic Systems Development Method


Categories: usability, information-architecutre,user-experience,
UX, theuxsuspects