CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Organizational Overviews
Introducing Usability At London Life Insurance Company: A Process Perspective
Brenda Kerton, Senior Consultant
London Life Insurance Company
255 Dufferin Avenue
London Ont. N6A 4K1 Canada
+1 519 432 5281
brenda.kerton@londonlife.com
ABSTRACT
This presentation describes how and why Usability Engineering
is being introduced at London Life. It describes the unique set
of circumstances that were present allowing us to integrate usability
engineering from day one in a project. It will cover our approach
to learning about and institutionalizing the usability process
into a well established internal systems development area. Our
future plans will also be discussed.
Keywords
user profile, work and task analysis, usability goal setting,
usability walkthroughs, application development process, organizational
context, sponsorship, skills transfer
© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
INTRODUCTION
London Life is Canada's premier financial security provider. The
company's aim for its 3.2 million customers is "Customers
for Life". It is within that customer service context that
usability engineering was first considered. As we put new technology
in our regional offices, the role of our 600 Customer Service
Assistants in those offices began to expand. While new technology
allowed us to move more customer service activities closer to
the customers, concerns were raised about the applications Customer
Service Assistants use. They had new applications and the legacy
applications that were designed and implemented over the past
30 years. Training was taking too long and each application required
a whole new training program. Any carried over learning from application
to application was luck, not good management. A quick look at
the current situation revealed that our systems development and
interface design approach had led to:
- independent applications - with little to no integration from
the performers' perspective
- presentation & function anywhere from very different to
more subtle differences
- little integration or use of reusable components within and
among applications
FROM PROBLEM TO USABILITY ENGINEERING
We did not start out knowing that we would be introducing usability
and user-centered design into the company! We had a problem to
solve. A unique set of circumstances led us down the path we are
now on.
- We had a group of users making it quite clear that the internal
development efforts were not fully meeting their needs. We were
not achieving the benefits the delivered applications were meant
to achieve.
- We had enough feedback from our Help Desk to know that many
of the problems being faced were related to the usage of the applications.
- We had growing experience in the area of Advanced Learning
Systems (ALS). We had been researching systems to help people
learn and developing some of our own performance support systems.
The people from this area have a strong belief in keeping the
performer at the center of development efforts.
- In the Information Services area, we had defined our business
processes and our staff is in part compensated and recognized
for using and improving those processes. The Application Process
is defined as the process by which we apply technology to improve
human performance. Within that process, we had identified the
importance of 'Ease of Use' as a factor to be considered during
development. We also had some existing GUI guidelines and standards.
Neither was enough to make the kind of difference ultimately needed
but we were at a state of readiness to improve those parts of
the process.
Finding the Right Path
Pointed in the direction of performer-centered design by the ALS
team and industry write-ups on usability in GUI design, it became
apparent that the field of Usability Engineering could provide
answers. We built a prototype to demonstrate what the world might
look like for a Customer Service Assistant if we took a business
role and business task approach and provided an integrated interface
to all the existing business systems. We called it the 'cockpit'.
We realized that we did not have the expertise internally to create
a truly usable and user-centered design but the prototype was
concrete enough to get the idea across.
Building Sponsorship and Getting Organized
That initial prototype was used to build upper management sponsorship.
We could easily talk to it, point out what we did not yet know
and at the same time show the potential. Within weeks we had approval
to proceed and started the work of finding an external consultant
and building our team internally. Even at this early stage we
knew we did not want someone to come in and do the work. We wanted
someone who would act as a mentor for the team. The proven ability
to transfer skills was a major factor in our assessments of the
consultants. Because of our already strong process focus we wanted
a consultant who understood how usability could fit into a development
process. We decided on Dr. Deborah Mayhew; a decision that has
proven a key to our success so far.
OUR APPROACH
The approach we decided to take is simple in concept and challenging
in reality! We decided to create the integrated interface to the
Customer Service Assistants (CSA) current applications as well
as provide the framework for all future applications targeted
to the CSA role. We also took on the project to design and build
a Common Client application that would be used by the 'cockpit'
application and be reusable by any other application that needed
access to client searches, adds and changes.
Our approach was designed so that we would use the projects to
learn what usability steps we needed to do from day one in a project,
in a very concrete way. At the same time, we could capture those
learnings and have examples and templates that future projects
could use. The following goals were defined for the project:
- To understand and clearly articulate the skills and process
(methodology, techniques) required for the development of usable
systems and effective graphical user interfaces.
- To deliver the first releases of the Customer Service Assistant
'cockpit' as well as a fully functioning Common Client application.
Integrating Usability Steps Into Our Development Process
The team officially kicked off at the beginning of May 1996. Dr.
Mayhew was onsite for the first week and then again about 5 weeks
later. The rest of the time we shared our work electronically
and this has continued throughout the project. She has indicated
to us that our work to date is probably the most efficient and
effective first-time use of usability techniques she has seen
among her client organizations over the last fifteen years. Since
May we have accomplished:
A User Profile
We did some initial data gathering and then surveyed 400 of the
600 users. We received well over 300 responses which were collated
and summarized graphically.
A Work Analysis
This was started by a Task Analysis where we spent six full days
of in-context observation. We also interviewed several users to
get higher level descriptions of their job. We documented all
the findings and used that to drive out the Organization of Functionality:
the breakdown of tasks into a hierarchy meaningful to the users.
We then tested that hierarchy by way of task sorting exercises
and revised it based on those tests.
Setting Usability Goals
Based on the user profile and work analysis, we generated, documented
and prioritized the usability goals for each of the two applications.
Conceptual Model Designs and Usability Walkthroughs
We generated three possible conceptual models. Since we had expert
Visual Basic developers on the project we generated those models
very quickly into prototypes ready for walkthroughs. We used an
existing video studio facility to set up a simple, yet effective,
usability lab. We conducted three iterations of walkthroughs ending
in a clear indication of which model to proceed with.
Sharing of Our Learning
First we created an on-line application that pulled together all
the templates, examples and documentation that we had so far created.
This application is available to all of our application developers
and is updated regularly. We are also putting together more formal
documentation that will be integrated into our Application Process
documentation available on our Intranet. This has already been
done for User Profiles and will be demonstrated during the presentation.
We have also conducted several meetings to demonstrate the usability
steps, the prototype and video clips from the walkthroughs. This
format has proven so successful that we are being asked do conduct
a meeting at least once a week. There is a large and growing interest
in our work from both business areas and systems developers. The
project work done so far has given us a level of credibility beyond
what we hoped for.
THE FUTURE
We are now in the wonderful position of having more demand than
we can handle. We are being asked to consider other roles in the
company and provide advise on other projects. The team is still
working to deliver the Customer Service Assistant applications
and will continue to perform usability evaluations as development
progresses. At the same time we are considering the best organizational
approach for ensuring that the Usability Engineering we have learned
is applied consistently in all projects and that our learning
grows as time goes on. We believe we will have a core group of
people to work on or consult with project teams around the usability
steps to be integrated into the Application Process.
CHI 97 Electronic Publications: Organizational Overviews
