Reporting user experience through usability within the telecommunications industry

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. Copyright 2008 ACM.