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Usability as risk management

getting businesspeople to see our vision of usability’s worth. But shifting our approach to a language they understand greatly improved that situation. We now portray usability not as an abstraction, but as risk management. To a businessperson, every action comes with two things: risk exposure and risk probability. Decisions are made considering both sides. Risk management is a prominent topic in MBA studies and is frequently practiced in business decision-making, both formally and informally. In essence, exposure and probability generate, respectively, the practical questions “How bad could it get?” and “How much do we need to spend to reduce the probability of the worst case coming to pass?” Companies protect themselves from risks in many different ways. Data is backed up, and the backups are moved off site. Business recovery plans are written and practiced. If we could portray a typical Web site or Web application in risk terms, managers would readily understand it, so we devised a way to do so. When discussing usability, we define the general risk as “Users do not make use of your product.” With today’s high cost of Web-site development, this is not a trivial consideration. It is the equivalent of buying crates full of costly equipment and then letting it sit unused in a warehouse. And loss of the initial investment is only the beginning of possible long-term repercussions. But we let management put forth the measure of how bad the consequences of failure could be, with our help. We can then analyze the responses and tell management how we propose to provide user involvement to minimize the probability of failure and loss, scaled to fit the degree of exposure that management has shared with us. Most of the time, reducing the probability of failure comes down to how much user involvement we can afford to include in design: the more user involvement, the less chance that the final design will fail its users. But as managers know, user involvement is always expensive, so it must be rationally balanced by high exposure. Of course, managers cannot make the leap to a risk analysis of Web sites or other high technology products unaided, which is why we use a questionnaire. We can either lead them through filling it out or have them do it before we talk with them. When several managers fill out the questionnaire, it stimulates conversation between them and helps them more clearly envision their entire effort. A sample questionnaire appears below. When evaluating the questionnaire, the various answers show a higher or lower exposure to risk, as demonstrated by Table 1. The assessment is not scientific, but more a matter of looking together at the various factors in combination and reaching a consensus. Let us examine two contrasting examples.