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Vickie Jones
Usability Designer
SAS |
SAS's usability "paramedic"
by Jesse Berkowitz and Jean Greco
Vickie Jones applies user-centered design throughout SAS' whopping two million intranet pages. The site presents a number of challenges, since content is added by different departments, yet navigation and appearance must be consistent.
"Our intranet exists to help our employees get their jobs done," Vickie says, "and we want to be highly effective with it. Therefore, it must be usable."
Nine years ago, Vickie was the only full-time web designer at SAS, the world's largest privately held software company. Today she's the usability lead on a six-member Web team that regularly applies techniques such as remote testing, card sorting, personas & scenarios, and heuristic evaluations to both internal and external sites (SAS also has a corporate usability team of analysts and human factors engineers).
Vickie's current role includes working with the Human Resources division of SAS. Her first initiative involved reviewing their proposed intranet home page redesign. Often, a simple usability test or expert review can uncover many problem areas that need attention.
In this case, a small project turned into a large one.
"We realized rather quickly that we had a ways to go to enjoy the benefits of good design in terms of efficiency and productivity," Vickie says. The project expanded to include usability testing of the departmental sub-sites.
When usability problems eventually get fixed, it leads to vastly improved communication and interactions, both internally and externally. Vickie's desire to support SAS' online communications led her to discover HFI's certification course for usability analysts.
| "A site shouldn't be based on how I think and feel – it needs to reflect user needs and perceptions. Through the certification process, I gained a big picture view of usability that I didn't have before." |
"Getting my CUA credential was positively received by management," she says. "Before I got certified, I often inserted my opinion into the design process. But a site shouldn't be based on how I think and feel – it needs to reflect user needs and perceptions. Through the certification process, I gained a big picture view of usability that I didn't have before."
In the three years since, SAS' Marketing Creative department has been swamped with usability requests. A remote testing procedure was recently launched and has already earned high praise from users throughout the company's 400 offices around the world. "We've gotten good feedback that we're involving our global offices. People appreciate that we're listening to them," says Vickie.
SAS Marketing Creative has also established a usability testing protocol especially for eliciting user requirements. "The user may not even know what they want... sometimes you have to help them uncover what they really need," Vickie explains.
Since Vickie is the only usability designer in her department, she acknowledges that SAS' usability buck often stops at her desk. "If someone in our department says 'we just can't use this site,' they see me," says Vickie. "I probably can stop the bleeding – I'm the usability paramedic. We support anybody that comes to us for help."
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