Wow, some title eh? Quite pleased with myself - sounds more like an academic paper than a blog post. Jakob says the microcontent's important though, so I'll let it stand.
A couple of weeks ago I was driving back to Manchester from London with a friend of mine who's an IT management consultant. He works for the public sector (national and local government organisations) and one of the things he mentioned was the "change curve".
The change curve theory says that people (and organisations) go through a number of different stages when a change is introduced - shock/denial -> depression/anger -> hope/acceptance -> commitment/ownership. From his point of view, the important thing is to be aware of these stages, and put in place measures to minimise the depth of the curve (sometimes called the "valley of despair", apparently).
This got me thinking about how the perceived ease-of-use of new software systems could impact on this. More specifically, how when large new systems are being implemented, a system with a greater perceived ease-of-use could help to shallow the curve and speed participants through to stages three and four (acceptance and ownership) more quickly.
My follow-on thought from this was – in these situations, should perceived ease-of-use be given a higher priority than overall usability metrics? That is, could it actually be more efficient and effective overall for the organisation to have a smoother implementation of the new system, at the expense of efficiency and effectiveness of the software in isolation from its organisational context.
I don't know the answer to this – I guess some studies would need to be done (and I don't see then - please point them out to me if you know where they are), and a cost-benefit analysis done on a case-by-case basis.
I'd be interested to know what others think.
The change curve and organizational change
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
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2 comments:
I guess it depends on how intuative you estimate your users to be. If you're users are the General Public then I wouldn't trust them to figure out which way round you're supposed to sit on a toilet, but if your users use the software professionally then they're going to be paid to be a bit more intuative than your average Joe...not that I'm saying that the public are thick, and professionals aren't.....On the contrary
But the question is: whoever your users are, will their resistance to new software be reduced by a greater perceived ease-of-use, and will this yield better results for the organisation that an interaction design that has better statistical usability, but is perceived as being harder to use?
Maybe, as I think you're saying, the effect will be smaller with more dedicated users. With the general public (e.g. a website) any change of design that does not have good perceived ease-of-use is likely to see your users deserting you in droves...
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