Hiring Specialists


There are times when resource constraints do not permit you to build the necessary expertise in-house to do something yourself. For nearly every task described in this book, from recruiting participants to competitive research to setting up video cameras, you can hire a professional to do it for you. For a price, experts can immediately bring nearly any knowledge and experience that you need.

But working with a professional is not simply writing a check and forgetting about the task. To use specialists effectively, they need to be hired at the right time, with the proper set of expectations, and then carefully managed.

Timing

A key to using specialists well is calling them in at the right moment. Often, consultants get the call to produce a perfect solution late in the game, after all in-house methods have failed and a deadline is approaching. More often than not, this is asking for a miracle. Unfortunately, despite the way some advertise themselves, consultants are not saints.

Note

I'm including consultants, contractors, and consulting agencies in my definition of specialist. Although a large consultancy (of the Accenture/KPMG/IBM Global Services model) works differently from a single contractor, their relationship to your product and your company is similar. They are called in to solve specific problems, and they work as an adjunct to your team, interacting when necessary, but keeping their responsibility to the one aspect of the development that they were hired to do. Your team's work may range all over the product as needs warrant it, but specialists will rarely leave their specialty to solve a problem they were not hired to solve.

The work that hired specialists do is not all that different from what your in-house staff can do, and it needs to be scheduled just like in-house work. Actually, it needs even a little more time than what you give your in-house projects since the specialists will need to learn about your product and the task that's involved.

I have been asked a number of times to "do a little user testing a couple of weeks before launch." I regret telling the caller that this is not unlike looking up to see where the moon is after you've already launched the rocket. The kinds of results that testing a completed product will reveal may help with tiny course corrections, but no amount of testing and adjustments will help if the rocket was pointed in the wrong direction. This holds for any other kind of specialty.

In addition, consultants, as opposed to other kinds of specialists, need to be called in especially early. Technical specialists don't teach you; they do it for you. They don't know your business before they come in and, most likely, won't after they leave. Good consultants, on the other hand, absorb enough of your business to recommend solutions and strive to transfer some of their expertise to you. Good consultants will leave your company in a state where you won't have to go to them with the same problem again. Good technical specialists will do their job quickly and accurately, but if it has to be done again, you'll probably have to call them back in.

Fortunately, it's hard to call user researchers in too early, but it's still important to do the right research at the right time. As discussed in Part 1 of this book, a good iterative development process involves user input at nearly every iteration. The responsibility for picking what research is needed is as much the project developers' as it is the researchers'. For example, if a product's interaction is usability-tested before the feature set has been defined, much of the information may go to waste since people's use of it will likely change based on the options available to them. Likewise, testing a product that's been built without first researching its audience's needs will result in a lot of unnecessary effort: if the product's audience has no interest in it, then they have little motivation to understand how it works or to use it in a realistic way.

Find a Specialist

For tasks with relatively straightforward needs, such as a single round of contextual inquiry or some focus groups to set feature priority, the procedure is similar to finding a carpenter for your house.

  1. Write a description of your research needs and goals. What kind of research do you want to do? Why? How are you going to use the results? This is similar to how you would prepare for your own research, as described in Chapter 5.

  2. Make a list of specialists to contact. Ask colleagues for recommendations or contact one of the usability professional organizations, all of which maintain lists of consultants and contractors. Some prominent organizations are

    • Usability Professional's Association, www.upassoc.org

    • American Society for Information Science and Technology, especially their Information Architecture special interest group, www.asis.org

    • Association for Computing Machinery's special interest group on computer-human interaction (ACM SIGCHI), www.acm.org/sigchi/

    • BayCHI, the San Francisco Bay Area's chapter of SIGCHI, which maintains a list of consultants that includes people in many geographic areas, www.baychi.org/general/consultants.html

  3. Check qualifications. The specific experience of the research companies should be investigated before you hire them. You probably don't want a carpenter who specializes in houses to make furniture or a furniture builder making a house. A user experience specialist may not have any experience doing marketing research even though the techniques are quite similar (and vice versa).

  4. Get quotes and an explanation of philosophy and techniques. If possible, get a sample results document from all the consultants under consideration. Read the results for an explanation of techniques and look for a sensitivity to the needs of the product and the client.

  5. Ask for references to several recent clients and follow up the references. Inquire into the quality and timeliness of work, but also the quality of service. Did the consultant follow through on what was promised? Did they listen? Were they responsive?

The Formal Method: RFPs

For more complex tasks (large focus groups, surveys, multiple iterations with different techniques), the procedure is more like that of building a house from scratch. Because of the size of the tasks and their interrelationships, the process of finding the right group of specialists can get quite complex.

  1. Write a request for proposals (RFP). An RFP is a description of your problem and a structured request for a solution. It's useful not just to set the parameters for evaluating a consultant's bid, but as the first step in managing and organizing a project. It sets out, in specific terms, what you believe your problems to be and what you want to gain from an outside solution.

  2. Broadcast the RFP. You can send the RFP to certain consultants that you've first contacted, or you can post it to a larger group. Don't spam, but certain mailing lists and bulletin boards allow you to post such requests (ask the moderators of lists about their RFP posting policies).

  3. Evaluate the responses. The consultants should respond quickly with specific solutions rather than sales pitches. Watch out for proposals that subcontract key work to another firm; if that's the case, then evaluate the subcontractor with the same rigor as you evaluate the primary contractor.

The following page has a sample RFP for a very large, longterm, multipart project. RFPs for smaller projects do not need all the sections and details of this one.

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SAMPLE RFP

Request for Proposal


User Experience Research for a B2B Surplus Industrial Products Web Site

January 12, 2003

Responses due: February 12, 2003

Part 1: Project Summary


We represent one of the world's leading raw surplus materials trading Web sites, which is undergoing a systemwide redesign. We are committed to using the best practices of user-centered design as part of this redesign and on an ongoing basis thereafter. With this RFP we hope to find a vendor who can fulfill the full complement of user research needs the project requires.

This RFP will outline for you our vision for the project, our selection criteria, and our expectations for your response.

Background

Our company runs one of the world's largest online industrial raw materials trading services. With over a billion dollars in transactions in FY2001 and 30,000 active users, we are one of the most prominent surplus materials trading services in the world. Our users count on us for the livelihood of their business and entrust us to deliver. We continually strive to improve our service for the benefit of our users and for our profitability.

Project Description


In the interest of improving the user experience of our service, we have launched a major redesign program, creating the service from top to bottom with an eye on the needs of, and input from, our users.

The redesign will be done in a series of phases. Each phase will involve the reexamination of the current product and a refinement of the product vision for the next design. User experience research will be a major component of each phase, and each phase will contain a major research project that will be appropriate for the goals of that phase.

The project will take place Q2–Q4 2003.

Part 2: Elements of Your Proposal


We would like your proposal to be in a specific format, containing all the sections described below. You may add sections if you feel that these do not sufficiently address your core competencies.

Questions


We would like to understand how you are thinking about this project. Please use the information contained in this RFP to answer these questions.

  1. One key to the success of this project will be to implement the users' needs as determined by the research, but those needs may not necessarily align with the business needs of the service. What process will you use to solve that challenge?

  2. Another key to a successful product is the transfer of knowledge from the user research staff to the production staff. In your view, what are the chief barriers to transferring user knowledge within a company, and how would you address them?

  3. What do you see as the most challenging barriers to the success of this project, and what should we do to ensure the best possible results?

Case Studies


Please present up to three case studies that highlight the strengths your company shows in managing projects such as the one described here. Present final deliverables and appropriate collateral.

Core Competencies


We seek a partner, or partners, that have demonstrated achievement in the following areas. Please give us specific examples, if possible, of your experience in these areas.

  • Analysis of complex information research and purchasing tasks

  • User experience–oriented focus groups

  • User testing of Web sites

  • Researching the needs of business Web site users, ideally large industrial and manufacturing users

  • Understanding the needs of new or occasional users and frequent long-term users

Your Process with Deliverables


Please describe the process your company would use to accomplish this project. Include a description of research, spec development, production, integration, Q/A, and methods of building consensus and sign-off at each stage.

Schedule


The schedule for the entire project is 220 days. Please provide a specific development timeline for this project. Break down your process by deliverables, and be specific about the timing for each section.

Client's Role


Please describe what, if any, expectations you have or deliverables you will need from our company for the project. Describe what sorts of resources you are expecting at each phase, and who from our company you will want to meet with.

Your Team


Please describe the specific roles of the individuals who would be assigned to this project. How many individuals would you assign to the project? To the extent possible, provide background and contact information on the individuals who would be assigned to the account and describe their specific responsibilities. Please identify key projects that each member has worked on in this capacity. Please also indicate the percent of their time that would be allocated to this project.

Budget


Please provide us with a detailed budget proposal. You may present your budget in any format that is familiar to you, but do include cost per milestone, hourly cost per team member, and anticipated expenses.

Also include a description of how cost is typically communicated during the course of a project, and how overages are managed and presented for approval.

References


Please provide us with names and contact information for three references from relevant recent projects that can comment on your services.

Process


We have invited several organizations to make a proposal on this project. Based on the quality and nature of those proposals, we will invite up to three companies to make presentations to us.

You will be given 1.5 hours to make your presentation and answer questions to the management team. Be prepared for detailed, specific review of budget and process. Please plan to bring the specific team members who will be assigned to this account, including the leads for project management, quantitative research, qualitative research, and analysis.

[Based on a template created by Janice Fraser]

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The Casual Method: Email and Phone Call

Most user experience research and design work, however, is not sufficiently complex to warrant the RFP process.

For most of our work at Adaptive Path, we prefer a short (several paragraph) email description of needs and problems, followed by a one- or two-hour conference call where we delve into details. This procedure saves both parties time—neither RFP nor RFP response need be written—and can focus quickly on the most relevant elements rather than trying to predict them ahead of time. We consider our role as consultants to begin at the first phone call, and we try to help clients understand and formulate their needs immediately rather than just responding to what they believe their needs to be. However, in situations where a project is huge and there are potentially many companies vying for it, a comprehensive RFP can be the best option.

Set Expectations

Going into a relationship with a specialist, especially a consultant or a consulting company, requires setting appropriate expectations on both sides.

As a client, you know your business better than they do. If they knew what you know, they'd be your competitors. Even if you tell them everything that you know, you will still know your business better than they will. You have more experience and should frame what you expect specialists to do from that perspective. The role that they play is not as replacements, but as information sources and tools.

Moreover, user experience researchers are, on the whole, better at uncovering problems than they are at creating solutions to those problems. It's tempting to want to go to a single source and have them tell you what your products' problems are and then give you the solutions to those problems. And consultants will happily give you what they believe is the best solution for a given problem, but it will still be coming from the perspective of someone who has limited experience with your business. The responsibility for taking their advice, understanding what it means in your situation, and applying it correctly is still yours.

Specialists provide perspective based on experience. Because of their experience, they know some general solutions that work better than others, and they can tailor those solutions to your problem. What they tell you may not match your perception of the world, but it's important to listen to them. Inside your development process, you come to conclusions based on a certain set of assumptions. No matter how honest and forthright you and your staff are, eventually you're all going to see the problems from much the same perspective, based on the same information. Outsiders come in with an entirely different set of assumptions and information, so their conclusions can be much different from yours. This does not mean that they are right and you are wrong, or vice versa, but the perspective they bring enriches yours. Allow them to ask fundamental questions and reintroduce topics that you may have already decided on.

One way to think about consultants is that they are people who know now what you will find out in two to three months if you don't hire them. That's it. Think of them as people who are a couple of steps ahead of you, and by hiring them you are shaving a couple of months off your development schedule. A couple of months of development time is really expensive, so bringing in specialists is generally worth the money. But what you're buying is time, not magic.

These expectations can be distilled into a series of guidelines for managing specialists.

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GUIDELINES FOR MANAGING SPECIALISTS
  • Know what you want. If you familiarize yourself with the basic ideas and methods of the industry, you can be a much more informed consumer of consulting services. Calling a user test a focus group is more than just a faux pas in a meeting with a consultant; it creates confusion as to the goals of the research and of the project as a whole. Once you know what's available, know what questions you want to get an answer to. Determining the goals of the research ahead of time based on the business needs of the company and the proposed product makes the results more meaningful and useful.

  • Schedule carefully. Research needs to address the needs of the company when it's delivered. When it comes too early, the project will likely have changed by the time it's needed. When it's too late, the time to fix the identified issues may have passed.

  • Provide lead time. As with any topic, the more preparation time the specialist has, the better the results are going to be. To recruit just the right audience may involve multiple iterations to get the screener right. To ask the right questions, the researcher needs to understand the research goals and your product. Analysis is always a time-consuming process, so the more time that is left for it, the better it's going to be. Consultants always benefit from an appropriate amount of lead time.

  • Be open to suggestions. Specialists may not know your business as well as you do, but if they suggest things that challenge your assumptions about the product or its market, their perspective should still be evaluated and considered. One product, for example, was supposed to be used by teenagers on PDAs while skateboarding. User testing revealed that although the teenagers could use the product, they were unlikely to bring their PDAs skateboarding. The consultant recommended that the information be made available in an easily printed format because paper is more portable and less valuable, but the client said, "we can't put ads there; paper is not where the money is."

  • Observe the process. Although reports and presentations are valuable summaries, the amount of information that can be put in them is a small fraction of the knowledge that can be collected by directly observing the consultants' process. Whenever possible, have members of the development staff watch the research live. If direct observation is impossible (as in the case of most contextual inquiry research), ask for copies of the videotapes and notes and study them. Since you as the client are more familiar with the product and the problems it's trying to solve, you're likely to notice things that the consultant would not.

  • Get a presentation. It's tempting to get a consultant's written report and skip the presentation. After all, the thinking goes, the presentation consists of the consultant reading the report to us, which we can do on our own. A good presentation goes beyond that. It allows the consultant to prioritize and emphasize issues, elaborate on points, and answer questions.

  • Treat the consultants as a resource after the initial research is over. Once they've done the research, consultants have a level of expertise that should not be neglected. If you have questions about their work after they've completed it, don't hesitate to ask them about it (but pay them for their time!). Sometimes it's even valuable to keep consultants on retainer for a couple of hours a month in between major research projects, bouncing ideas off them and clarifying observations. Over time, they may lose some objectivity, but they'll gain a deeper understanding and commitment to your product and its audience.

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The relationship between a specialist and client can be a valuable one. When it works, both parties benefit and learn from each other, while making the development process a bit more efficient. When it doesn't, it can be broken off easily, and neither is much the worse than before. In the long term, the most valuable aspect of reusing knowledge and experience is it makes the whole industry more efficient and gives everyone a reason to think about the things that really matter. Don't reinvent the wheel if you don't have to.




Observing the User Experience. A Practioner's Guide for User Research
Real-World .NET Applications
ISBN: 1558609237
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 144

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