Greetings WOW members and Web professionals everywhere. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.
For today?’s podcast, I have the pleasure to be interviewing Cia Romano, Founder and Usability Researcher at Interface Guru based in Arizona.
Cia is a sought after speaker and serves an evangelist for end users, researching and reporting on why user-centered design for the web, intranets, software and kiosks is mandatory for success. A hands-on user interface expert, Romano has developed the Usable Times 5 criteria for ranking computer screen effectiveness. The metric, based on her usability lab studies, focuses on user response to five factors consistently observed in the lab: orientation, permission, interactivity, relevance and speed.
I called on Cia to help me better understand if as a profession, are we making any headway in the areas of Usability standards, adoption rates and Web professional education in general.
For the three minute interview check out today’s WOW Technology Minute website.
A complete transcript of this podcast will be available in twenty-four hours.
Today’s WOW Technology Minute is sponsored by the Web 2.0 Expo New York taking place September 16 – 19, 2008 at the Javits Center New York, NY.
From start-ups to enterprises, the Web 2.0 Expo New York is the event for the designers, developers, entrepreneurs, VCs, marketing professionals, product managers and business strategists building businesses on the web.
Seven conference tracks, a vibrant expo hall and plenty of networking events cover business strategy, web design, user experience, SEM, tagging, developer hacks, community building, AJAX, Ruby, web operations, user-generated content, and more.
Check out all of the great links including a discount code for WOW members on the WOW Technology Minute website.
Register today at Web 2 Expo website and use code webny08bm6 to receive 20% off your full conference pass.
Transcript of Usability Web Professional Education with Cia Romano
BILL CULLIFER: Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. For today?’s podcast I have on the phone Cia Romano, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of InterfaceGuru.com based in Arizona. Cia?’s a sought after speaker and serves as an evangelist for end users, researching and reporting on why user-centered design for web, intranets, software and kiosks is mandatory for success. Good afternoon Cia and thanks for agreeing to this interview.
CIA ROMANO: Good afternoon Bill. Thanks for the opportunity.
BILL: Cia, you?’ve been practicing as a web professional for a number of years now and I?’m podcasting this week on web professional education. I?’d like to ask you to help me better understand a couple of things. Number one, are we making headway with a general understanding and the adoption of usability standards?
CIA: Well Bill, that?’s an excellent question and my immediate answer would be we?’re not making enough headway. In 1999 when we founded the company we were completely understanding that perhaps large organizations had not thought about the need for information design and usability. I?’m very sorry to see that the state of affairs has not changed that much in 2008.
BILL: Why is that Cia?
CIA: I think that the issues are, from the outset, are a lack of knowledge. I think there?’s still a tremendous lack of understanding in terms of the proper phases that need to happen in web development and planning and design, which is the place where usability and information design would occur, is highly misunderstood. So people typically jump into builds because I think they want to see something before actually thinking through how these products should work.
BILL: Cia, can you offer any recommendations for those working in the enterprise? And how about small business?
CIA: Organizations at the enterprise level probably have millions of transactions occurring on screens every year. If you add ten seconds to each of those transactions, because an interface is unusable, you?’re adding millions of dollars to the cost price.
BILL: Good point.
CIA: So that?’s very simple math. I think for the smaller business, how do you know you?’re not going to grow into a larger business? And the issue here is that whether you?’re a sophisticated web user or you?’re a less sophisticated web user you are going to make an assessment about the quality of an organization based on the usability of its website.
BILL: OK, the web?’s been around for a while, and you?’d think that we?’re past that point of justifying a solid web strategy, so what do you think?’s going on?
CIA: Honestly, technology is never the problem and people usually are the problem. And when I say the problem, being to your point, this should be well understood now because we?’re all doing business on the web. So I think what?’s really happening is that there?’s a cultural disconnect between business decision makers and sometimes the implementers who are making, and I?’ll just say IT Department for shorthand, but people who are making that happen. So it?’s a lack of education in the sense that the business decision makers probably don?’t have enough of exposure to the web development process or to best practices to know what to request from IT. And conversely IT, I think, may be so up to their elbows in trying to make things happen that there?’s never a time to stop and actually plan a process or plan a transaction or plan a user type, the definition of a user type and task, which are at the core of usability.
BILL: Very interesting. Well certainly we appreciate your time and your perspective Cia.
CIA: Thank you, Bill!