lead
inspire

Envision
motivate
Educate
Equip

 

• Figure 1. The Virtuous Cycle of Culture Change

define an appropriate framework that deconstructs the experience along the lines of the vision into components that are meaningful to the user, we can identify the degree to which each impacts overall satisfaction and therefore business value. Furthermore, if we can drive a consistent set of user-feedback tools across the organization based on value, ease of use, and other factors, managers will not only have information about what is working and not working for users, but they’ll also be able to compare application experiences and make better decisions about the relative importance of various experiences and where to invest in improvements.

consistent measurement and to drive even broader adoption. By sampling the user population as they use the released application, often via user panels, the value is in motivating release over release improvement. The goal is to build the metric into the system in a way that ensures both its exposure in the standard dashboards used throughout the management chain and that it is discussed during strategic and tactical review sessions.

The next step is to increase
the visibility of the metric across
the management chain. That
alone is often enough to stimu-
late action. No team wants to
have a red or even a yellow box
around user satisfaction next to
their project. Within Microsoft,
however, each employee from
the front line to senior manage-
ment has specific goals they are
attempting to meet and has iden-
tified ways to measure whether
they have been delivered. There
is an opportunity, therefore,
to drive more activity around
satisfaction by building user
satisfaction into these goals and
identifying additional metrics
that clearly drive satisfaction.
For more senior management,
the goals would include either
achieving specific target levels or
achieving some percent increase
year over year. For people closer
to the front line, the goals might
include either target levels for
usefulness and ease of use, or
operationally equivalent perfor-
mance-oriented goals.

Equip

An underutilized area where the UX impact can be extended is through the architecture, as well as the reuse it enables. The architecture we build into our solutions assumes Microsoft and partner platforms. In the middleware layer, systems correspond to business capabilities. Above the middleware layer, capabilities are combined to support user applications. The applications are then rendered to support an expanding ecosystem of devices as users move from device to device, and to user support groups collaborating to achieve the goals of their activity. This is where the usefulness is delivered—we intend to deliver satisfaction by contextualizing the experience through end-to-end user scenarios that are supported in the design. Integrating UX into the architectures used by the teams is one way to insert the experience into the DNA of the organization.