Making user-centred design a priority in large organisations: a case study of a usability audit

A range of national and international initiatives, such as ISO 9241, have identified interface design as a critical stage in the software development process. Such initiatives will only be successful if the 'corporate culture' of commercial organisations grows to recognise the importance of usability. It can, however, be extremely difficult for companies to gain a clear view of attitudes towards interface design within their organisation. This argument has been supported by the results of a twelve month study in a UK based, multi-national company. Software users were questioned about their response to the proprietary and bespoke systems that the company provided. Software developers were studied and their attitude to usability assessed during the requirements stage of a major development project. Although the results from these studies did provide valuable insights into attitudes towards usability, our main findings relate to the problems of assessing attitudes towards interface design. Some of these problems relate to the difficulty of mapping technical terms such as 'consistency', 'learnability' and 'error' onto the subjective experiences of the employees within the company. Other problems stem from the tremendous impact that the Hawthorne effect seems to have upon commercial software engineers and project managers.