Gerry Gaffney of Information & Design recently interviewed me about Selling Usability, my new book about “sneaking” usability and user experience into organizations. Don’t miss it.
Here’s an excerpt…

Companies don’t really care about user experience and usability any more than, for example, they care about, let’s say thermodynamics, or electricity. A company doesn’t care about electricity. Usability is a means to an end for companies, that’s even if they think of it that way.

Companies care about profits, they care about customer satisfaction, they care about market share. And really it’s our job – we need to use our usability skills here – it’s our job to know what managers, marketers, product teams and perhaps VPs and CEOs – what they need. We should be positioning what we do to help them, and help drive the profits and the bottom line.

So this isn’t really an anti-usability issue, right? It’s not a problem for them to solve. It’s not that they are against usability. The problem is actually the problem of each usability professional. It’s each user experience professional looking at this, and they need to put on their thinking caps, they need to reverse the problem and say “What can we do to make ourselves more business savvy?”

That’s the challenge. I’m not trying to imply that companies don’t care about user experience. They care about the results of what we do very, very much, and we need to find really good ways of translating our outputs and our deliverables to something that makes sense to the folks that actually go after customers, drive market share and really the bottom line.

Don’t miss the Selling Usability interview with Gerry Gaffney: