Reporting User Experience through Usability within the Telecommunications Industry Kari Rönkkö School of Engineering Blekinge Institute of Technology Soft Center, SE 372 25 Ronneby, Sweden Kari.Ronkko@bth.se Jeff Winter School of Engineering Blekinge Institute of Technology Soft Center, SE 372 25 Ronneby, Sweden Jeff.Winter@bth.se Mats Hellman Product Planning User Experience UIQ Technology AB Soft Center VIII SE 372 25 Ronneby, Sweden Mats.Hellman@uiq.com ABSTRACT In some software development contexts, understanding ‘who else’ to report usability results to and how this must be done has a larger impact on the usability of products, in the long run, than reporting results to designers and developers in planned and ongoing software development projects. This situation is true in some parts of the telecommunication area. This is an area that constantly presents new usage possibilities arising from new ‘hot’ technology and competitive situations, i.e. not primarily from internally identified user needs. Understanding how use-oriented knowledge can have the greatest impact in this context is a challenge. As engineers we must be prepared to adjust our work to varied actors and environments under specific conditions to optimize our influence. In this case, how do the ‘new hot technology and competitive situation focus’ affect our possibilities to introduce use-oriented knowledge? Our desire to achieve highest leverage from performed usability work made us realize that we need to take advantage of existing usability test reporting as a first step in introducing more of user experience in the user-orientation. Categories and Subject Descriptors [Management]: Software quality assurance (SQA). D.2.9 [Metrics]: Product metrics. D.2.8 [User Interfaces]: Theory and methods, User-centered design H.5.2. General Terms: Design, Documentation, Human Factors, Management, Measurement Keywords: Use-orientation, market driven requirements engineering, telecommunication area, usability, user experience, usability test, usability metrics 1. INTRODUCTION In Jensen’s article Lead, wallow, or get out of the way [6] it is argued that usability professionals have an unpredicted leadership opportunity in the coming decade. What needs to be done is to change the conversation to change the exchange of information and the thought process [6]. It is suggested that usability professionals take a new active leadership role within the company; that they participate in business and management discussions. In order to help business leaders, usability experts need to talk the language of business and not the language of science (e.g. metrics debates). In this paper we discuss our starting point for this new leadership. For those actors who advocate the view of textbook descriptions and formal expectations of roles and responsibility in an organization, it might be a challenging thought that understanding “who else” to report usability results to, and how this must be done; can in the long run have a greater impact on the usability of products than reporting results to designers and developers in planned and ongoing software development projects. This is in conjunction with the fact that it is well known that many failures in software projects and IT businesses can be explained by a too superficial understanding of the work practice to be supported. Software products are created by people, working in varied environments, under varied conditions – we need descriptions of these social worlds to enable high quality development of methods, techniques and tools. Beside procedures/what is being done we need to emphasis interaction/how it is being done in the social settings in which the phenomenon is embedded. A too superficial understanding of the work practice is a general issue in academic discourses. In the CSCW and PD community many types of discourse can be found that demonstrate this point (for PD see [8, p.9]). One example from software engineering (SE) is [13] who provide their own study and an overview of CSCW studies that focus upon SE and address the relationship between methods and system development. The authors demonstrate how the software engineers who participated in the study innovatively played out the idealized understandings of a company’s organizational prescriptions in unexpected and ‘unknown ways’ to enable them to get the project work done. In this paper we describe how company and telecommunication area related conditions affect the possibilities that usability professionals have to introduce user experience and influence software development. Thereafter we present our first step towards a solution; to build in to existing usability reporting channels a continuous distribution of user experience and usability lessons learned to managers, product owners, clients, and marketing people. 2. THE TELECOM AREA The influence that the competitive situation and the fact that the telecommunication area focuses on new ‘hot’ technology has on Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. CHASE’08, May 13, 2008, Leipzig, Germany. Copyright 2008 ACM 978-1-60558-039-5/08/05…$5.00. 89 Rönkkö, K., Winter, J., and Hellman, M., Reporting user experience through usability within the telecommunications industry. Proceedings of the 2008 International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering CHASE08 (Leipzig, Germany, May 13 - 13), ACM, New York, NY, pp. 89-92, 2008.DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1370114.1370137