INTEGRATING USABILITY AND MARKETING ACTIVITIES: A METHOD FOR SUPPORTING ACCELERATED DESIGN STRATEGIES

Although the practice of user-centered design is advocated in many organizations, engineering management issues may prevent early focus on system usability. Within the usability engineering cycle, practitioners consider task analysis and customer needs assessment a high priority. Market research activities occur early in the process, but usability information is not collected or passed to system developers. To improve and to accelerate the design process and to validate user preference findings, task analysis and market research surveys were performed concurrently during the design validation phase of a data communications product. The basic process steps included: forming a multidisciplinary team, identifying data sources, collecting data via interviews and event record review, transforming data into task models and product opinion matrices, and using the models and matrices to design a sample product. A number of benefits were observed using this method: improved economies of research and analysis time, increased strength of product opinion data, early product improvements, increased customer understanding of the product, and an improved product engineering process.