Consulting experiences: making user-centred design work

The paper provides an overview of the author's experiences, over the last 6 years (1993-9), of providing user centred design consultancy through Microsoft Consulting Services (MCD)in the UK. It identifies common problems in user centred design (UCD) consulting projects, and outlines approaches that have been successful in selling and conducting user centred design. The UCD work carried out by MCS differs from that of many other consultants in that it teaches customers' project teams how to do UCD for themselves, rather than doing it for them. The nature of this work requires a tailored approach to be taken on each project, depending on the customer's requirements, current skill level, existing development methodologies, and level of commitment to integrating UCD into its development lifecycle. Many UK development companies will probably never hire HCI professionals, so it is vital that developers are taught to consider users during application design, making usability just as natural a part of the development process as designing for reliability, scalability and manageability. It is not expected that clients' development staff will become HCI professionals with detailed knowledge of cognitive psychology or experimental design and statistics. The primary goal is to provide Microsoft's development partners and customers with a structured process and set of practical techniques that they can use to bridge the gap in communication and understanding between their developers and their users.