After a successful kickoff in New York, the iRise User Group meeting series moved on to Atlanta this week.  A few highlights from the Atlanta session:

Emmet B. Keeffe III, iRise CEO, has been thinking about starting a blog called the “Trail of Tears”, chronicling the software development experiences of IT departments around the world.  Speaking with hundreds of CIOs each year, Emmet has heard some incredible stories, like the large bank that had a $100M write-off on a single project, or the SAP project that had the right functionality, but such horrible usability the users “revolted” and refused to use it.

Kevin O’Connor, VP Client Services for User Insight, gave the keynote presentation, and talked about usability, not just for products, but for the entire customer experience.  When it comes to usability, Kevin suggests we follow Mark Twain’s advice, “Supposing is good, but finding out is better.”

User Insight runs a dozen or so usability testing projects each month and they’ve gleaned some best practices from their experience that he shared with the audience:

• Create a user experience roadmap
• Incorporate voice of customer into your design – create personas and use them to inform and validate new projects
• Iterate with various levels of fidelity and share your results across the company, especially with top level execs
• Spend 8% – 10% of a project budget on usability testing.  Most spend 1% or less, so you need to focus on the strategic, high profile applications

Kevin also cautioned that usability and user experience are not the same thing.  Great product usability is wasted if it is surrounded by a bad user experience.  He cited Apple and Holiday Inn as companies who “get it”, and he shared a story about a DSL company that didn’t.  They perfected the usability of a diagnostic tool, but the upstream user experience was so bad that had lost trust in the company and wouldn’t use the tool.

Karen Bennett is responsible for user experience at IHG, parent company for Holiday Inn and 6 other hospitality brands.  Her group, including usability, interface design and experience architecture, will double in the next year from its current size of 13.  Her team tackles 50 – 60 projects each year.

Karen shared her experiences from the $1B re-launch of the Holliday Inn brand earlier this year.  They had to launch the Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express sites in 7 languages, and cut 8 months out of the schedule.  They built iRise wireframes visualizations and presented them to the execs to get buy-in.  They even used a Chinese datasheet to show how the site would look in another language.  Visualization helped IHG get a jump start on their content strategy and engage outside agencies much earlier in the process.  Karen says, “If we didn’t have iRise, we would have built a multimillion dollar website that nobody could use.”  She also warns other companies to be prepared, “when you do this kind of visualization, your phone is going to start ringing off the hook.”

Corey Glickmanis a Principal at Capgemini and founder of their Rapid Development and Visualization (RDV) practice.  Corey outlined a variety of factors that are forcing businesses to change their focus from Information Technology, to Business Technology.  As CIOs become more strategic, they need their Systems Integrator partners to expand and redefine themselves.  ERP implementation is becoming a commodity, so Systems Integrators need to move up the value chain to help clients develop the ideas that will differentiate them, and the systems and processes that will help them execute those ideas. 

One way that Capgemini is redefining its services is through their Rapid Design and Visualization (RDV) labs located around the world.  These labs help accelerate results, enhance collaborative design, and manage complex ideas through visualization.  The labs incorporate Cap’s Accelerated Solutions Environment (ASE) where facilitators and visualizers work with clients to produce powerful results in a very short time.  Corey mentioned one client, a European manufacturer of ball bearings, who built a 5-year plan in 5 days using visualization.  Cap is able to network their labs together and even links them with iRise Centers of Excellence that are set up at client locations.

Jason Geer, a visualization expert from Bank of America, explained how they are using iRise, along with Rational Requisite Pro to manage over 2,000 projects a year.  Jason says B of A gets a variety of benefits from visualization, including:

• Improved requirements
• Higher quality
• Reduced risk and rework 
• Speed to market

Reduced costs

At B of A, they started using visualization to gather requirements, then, they moved “upstream” to the ideation and scope definition phases of their project process.  They also moved downstream to facilitate the hand-off to development.  Jason says, “Simulation helps get everyone on the same page – without a visual, you never know if you are building the right thing.”

An iRise User Panel discussion, along with iRise presentations on the next release of iRise, and creative ways to take visualization to the next level, rounded out the day-long agenda in Atlanta.

Want more details from the Atlanta User Group meeting? Video from selected sessions will be available on the iRise site in the coming weeks.  The User Group series continues throughout October, next stop: Chicago.  Click here for more information on meeting locations and dates.