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.