User Centered Design Toolkit: Tools For Enterprise Usability

Ovo Studios has developed a set of web-based tools for Enterprise Usability called the UCD Toolkit. These customizable, easy-to-use web applications provide a robust set of features that supports your team's user-centered design efforts in two ways:

Centralizes, summarizes, and organizes your data.
By keeping your collateral in an online, searchable format, the UCD Toolkit increases your usability team's visibility, makes your collateral more accessible, and touts your team's ROI in a dashboard-like fashion.
Supports consistency via reuse and cross-referencing.
The UCD Toolkit exposes hooks to Ovo Logger so practitioners can reference warehoused guidelines, results, and recommendations in their report.

The UCD Toolkit is licensed on a yearly basis and may be customized to the needs of your organization so categories, metrics, and descriptors match the way your team does business.

The modules below outline the major functional areas of the UCD Toolkit.

Impact Tracker

Ovo Studios Impact Tracker is an online application that allows you to collate design recommendations from multiple usability test reports and record the implementation data for those recommendations. Impact Tracker also automatically generates reports with pie and bar charts for looking at large sets of implementation data. Imagine being able to automatically generate a report tracking implementation statistics by product, usability team member, fiscal quarter, or any other metric. Impact Tracker is the key to tracking and reporting your team's impact on your organization.

Report Viewer

Ovo Logger has always exported reports to HTML Format. Realizing the need for visibility and open deployment of usability data, we now offer Report Viewer, which provides a searchable, filterable web interface for finding usability data.

Visitors to your usability team website can search for reports based on criteria like the following:

product name
activity date
report author
many other pertinent metrics.

Reports are shown in an easy-to-use tree view, which allows you to jump directly into subsections of a given report.

Online Guideline Tool

The Ovo Studios Online Guideline Tool allows your usability practitioners to create and deploy guidelines and standards online, using an easy-to-use interface. Practitioners can provide good and bad examples of the given guideline in practice, can associate the guideline with other guidelines, and can even make reference to Ovo Logger results as examples of the positive or negative application of the given guideline. Guidelines and Standards can be categorized by product, platform, or other categories, so developers and other consumers can easily access the guidelines which pertain to them.

Why is Enterprise Usability so important?

Ovo Studios has combined years of experience working in product development organizations with our proven leadership in tools for usability to create a concept called "Enterprise Usability."

Enterprise Usability is the organizational aspect of deploying usability and user-centered design methodologies into a company or product development environment.

Read more about selling User-Centered Design Processes at The UCD Decision Matrix site or our Enterprise Usability whitepaper (pdf.)