Partnering With Change Agents in Your Organization: A Story About Collaborating With Six Sigma Practitioners To Make a Better UI
Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 — 6:00 to 7:30pm
Download Presentation [PDF | 172 KB | 20 Pages]
At my previous company, the UCD team learned about a business problem that no one had been able to solve: callers to the Tech Support line were consistently choosing the wrong option from the voice prompts, and ending up talking to the wrong support team. Callers would then get transferred back into queue and have to go through the same process. This was frustrating for users, and costly to the company.
We made contact with the “Six Sigma” process improvement team, and proposed a user-centered approach to the problem. The Six Sigma practitioners saw value in our approach. We combined their ability to influence stakeholders and drive change with our ability to design for human abilities and limitations, and successfully advocated for and implemented a redesign. The results were immediate and dramatic.
About Our Speaker
Paul Sherman is an expert in the field of usability and user-centered design. He is currently Director of User-Centered Design at Sage Software/Small Business Division, in Atlanta, GA. His team is the UCD resource for the Peachtree Accounting and Timeslips product lines.
At his prior position he headed the Dallas office of Perceptive Sciences, a usability and user-centered design consultancy. At Perceptive Sciences his projects included usability testing and interface design for IT applications, ecommerce Web sites, financial planning and portfolio management software applications, and telecommunications hardware and software applications.
Before moving to Texas, he was at Lucent Technologies in New Jersey, where he supervised the user interface design of several telecommunications management applications, and led efforts to develop cross-product user interface standards.
Paul received his Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of Texas at Austin. His research focused on how pilots use of computers and automated systems on the flight deck affected their individual and team performance. While at UT-Austin Paul logged over 145 flights observing pilots in the cockpit during commercial airline flight operations.
He is also Vice-President of the Usability Professionals’ Association, was the founding President of the UPA Dallas/Fort Worth chapter, and is a Full Member of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.