What you can do Right Now - Book Club: Don't Make me Think - Chapter 13

Andrew Nolan

2023-05-14

One question Krug often hears from readers after finishing this book is "how can I convince my job to prioritize usability work?"

There are several things you can do to get more involved and begin implementing all these UX tips you've learned from the book and these blogs.

First, if your company has a UX department, get involved! Learn what they are doing and how you can help. Sit in on a usability study to learn how it works. Ask if they have suggestions for the apps you work on.

If you have no UX support, you can encourage management to prioritize it.

Although usability is about user advocacy, businesses may not care about that. In our lovely capitalist world, they care about money, so you need to speak their language. Highlight metrics like KPIs, pain points, touch points, CSI, whatever buzzwords are common in your organization.

You can read or reference Cost Justifying Usability: An update for the internet age by Randolph Bias and Deborah Mayhew. This book highlights that usability has a positive ROI.

If you can, get your boss to spectate a usability study to highlight all the issues. You can show them benchmarks from your competitors that you can work towards as well.

In the worst case scenario, you can run some informal usability studies on your own time. Share your website or app with your family and gather their feedback. If you get enough good feedback and improvements, you may start getting formal usability support. Although I don't really advocate doing too much extra labor outside of work, balance is important and so is your personal life.

If management isn't cooperative, remember as a developer you have control of the code. You can start usability by advocating for the user and pushing back against negative design patterns.

This blog concludes our series on Don't make me Think. I hope you enjoyed and learned something. Please share any thoughts you had about it with me! I'd love to hear them.

If we do another book club it will likely be about AI. See ya then!

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