Lessons learned

The usability focus groups are done, so what was learned? Well, Bogota wasn’t as scary as I feared. I only spent a day and a night there but the folks that I worked with were great, very positive and helpful. Mexico City was similar, and Dallas provided one of the best sessions overall in terms of engagement and interest on the part of the participants.

In terms of the prototype, the reaction to the approach and information architecture was positive and surprisingly universal. We were looking for cultural variations, but there weren’t any major things that have to be accomodated. Despite that, in each session there was at least one suggestion for a feature or an aspect of usability improvement that was unique. This was an enormously valuable exercise and provides important considerations for our self-service approach.

I now feel that I have a much freer hand to build on top of the concepts that I used for the enterprise portal, and I’m figuring on having a model in the next 90 days. I’m going to assume no constraints from a technology/vendor perspective because a) I want an ideal state and b) it will be necessary to get some people’s thinking out of the current application-centric model. I’m also less concerned about how this nascent concept will play around the world.

If things quiet down I hope to dig in between the holidays to model some of this out. But first, I’m taking a little break with my family for a few days of fun in Vermont. I’m about as mediocre as it gets but I love to ski. My daughter is a bit of a skier, and this will be her first time on a full-size mountain, we visited a junior mountain last winter. My younger son has visions of shredding the slopes on a snowboard…so he’s signed up for beginner lessons and I’m keeping my fingers crossed. My wife is the sane one, she’ll be chilling off the slopes. We’re heading off tomorrow morning, so everybody have a wonderful holiday weekend.