Carol Kilpatrick from Delta Technology presented a case study today on how iRise was used at delta.com in a merchandising application project.

Delta first started using iRise in August 2006 in a pilot project for a flight attendant application and trained 10 users.  In February 2007, they started a new pilot project to add merchandising functionality to delta.com.  By March 2008, Delta expects to roll out iRise across the organization and will be training up to 70 users.

The Delta Merchandising Project was a project to allow customers to add hotel, car, trip insurance, etc. to the delta.com site.  The major opportunity was time-to-market.  They thought it was going to be simple and easy, but it turned out to be harder because of time constraints.  Usability for a major booking project is ideal because so many people will ultimately end up using the application.  Ideally, they would have wanted to recruit users in profile area to test for approx. 1 hour.  Due to time constraints, they had to do a quick and dirty usability test by using customers at the airport.  Using a custom, portable usability testing lab with 2 laptops and a webcam, they literally pulled people out of the concourse to do testing.

Being able to do usability testing was one of the big wins from using iRise.  In past, usability testing was not done until design phase

Carol summarized her presentation by identifying why they used iRise for the delta.com Merchandising project:

• The UX professional could use iRise on the project after minimal instruction
• iRise enables quick simulation turn-around
• iRise supports stakeholder communication through the Definition Center and iDocs