UCD Activities: What Activities?

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Results

The following chart represents the number of respondents who reported performing an activity in the year 2000. For example, 71 out of 100 respondents reported that they administered a usability test in 2000. 

This chart does not tell you:

•  how many times they performed a specific activity 
• or what activity they performed in a given development phase. 

Categories marked with "(Other)" represent bottom-up categories that were developed from respondents' write-in activities. These rolled-up categories contain the following activities:

Survey (Other)	This category contains "Other" activities respondents listed that involve surveying, interviewing, or generally getting feedback from people. Get feedback from internals Conduct surveys Get customer journals Conduct focus groups Conduct post-release assessment Interview instructors Interview customers
Work w/ Internals (Other)	This category contains "Other" activities respondents listed that involve working with members of the development team or other members of the practitioner's company: Developer awareness, education, consulting Fight fires Stakeholders meeting Costing and effort workups
Development Activities (Other)	This category contains "Other" activities respondents listed that involve development-like activities: Information architecture design Graphic design Write requirements Set usability and product requirements Develop websites
Misc. UCD Activities (Other)	This category contains "Other" activities respondents listed that are typical UCD activities: Write scenarios Develop style guide Context analysis Task analysis

Discussion

Over half of the respondents reported that they performed the following activities in 2000:

• Administered a usability test (71%)
• Developed a paper or other prototype (68%)
• Performed a heuristic review (65%)
• Conducted customer interviews (56%)

These results can have the following impact on your negotiations with development teams:

• Across the software industry, usability practitioners are doing a lot more than just usability testing, so there is no reason for you to be pigeon-holed into that role.
• The four activities that the majority of usability practitioners are performing provide coverage for all phases of the development lifecycle, so you can add value regardless of what phase a product is in :
  Requirements: Conducted customer interviews (56%)
  Design: Developed a paper or other prototype (68%)
  Develop: Administered a usability test (71%)
  Test: Performed a heuristic review (65%)

Regarding our questionnaire methodology, we excluded some obvious UCD activities like task analysis and scenario writing. These activities are probably being performed more frequently than the data suggest, but users were not likely to write-in other activities they performed -- they were more likely to confine their reporting to selecting from the list of available activities.