Companies have long regarded digitalization as a means to automate operations and eradicate human error, but are we starting to see an inverse truth?
Poorly integrated systems force customers to iteratively reenter information as they get routed from station to station in a phone call.
Automated billing systems bill twice.
Chat functions take you down paths of no return when all you wanted was a simple answer.
When these things happen, systems get blamed and so does IT.
How can CIOs change digital projects so that both humans and digital automation can take their best steps forward?
1. Reimagine digital project engineering so it includes usability
When we think about digital project engineering, the goal is to design hardware and software and ensure that these components fit together into a cohesive system. The focus is on the technical, with only secondary attention being paid to the human usability of the project.
Assumptions going into a digital project are that it is naturally going to make life easier for users and save money for the company, yet consultancies like McKinsey say that there is a 70% failure rate for digital projects.
One contributing factor to digital project failure is usability. Usability problems show up in the excessive abandon rates of automated phone attendants, in websites that have complicated chats, or in internal business process automation that renders everyday work to become more, not less, complex.
All of these undesirable outcomes can be avoided if digital project engineering includes human usability upfront.
2. Implement human factors engineering
A jet plane quality assurance expert at a major manufacturer recently explained to me that when jet planes are designed, quality assurance engineers include detailed check-outs of the logistics and instrumentation of the cockpit. The goal is to make flying the plane as intuitive and as easy as possible for pilots. Safety is one goal. Efficiency, effectiveness and usability are others.
Digital project managers can learn from this. They can start by inserting human factors engineering into project design, QA and implementation plans. The questions that should be asked by the project team are: Is an application easy and straightforward to use? Are all field names labeled, self-explanatory, and understandable? Does the flow of each transaction make good business sense? Is screen navigation easy and intuitive? If a user needs help, is a help function available that is populated with relevant information?
3. Perform rigorous exception testing
Human creativity is limitless — and so are the ways that different groups of users use applications. It’s usually the job of the IT QA group and a handful of end users to test and trial run a system before the system goes live. The focus is on finding and resolving technical bugs and glitches. However, the actual usability of an application is seldom on QA checklists — nor are the exceptions to processing that can occur when a broad cross section of humans coming from different environments and experiences begin to use the system. An example is the project team in Philadelphia that designs a system but doesn’t think about the rural customer who lives at a physical address but only gets their mail at a P.O. Box in town. The customer tries to enter their P.O. Box in the billing address field of an online application and gets an error. Why? Because no one in QA thought about the processing exception of an individual having a PO Box for mail and a physical address for where they live.
4. Use a software continuous release methodology for system usability, fixes and enhancements
Even if your QA process is thorough and mindful of all of the exceptions to processing that must be tested, there will still be areas that are overlooked. New software enhancements are also continuously occurring. To keep up with this constant rate of change, which should also include human usability improvements, it’s a sound practice to issue continuous releases of software changes, provided that the changes are thoroughly tested first.
5. When feasible, use an Agile development methodology on digital projects
Not all systems and applications are a “fit” for Agile software development, but projects that can be developed with Agile have a jump on usability because humans from diverse areas of the company are continuously interacting with each other during the project build and test phases of a system. These continuous human interactions do not supplant the need to perform extensive exception testing for what human might do, but they do bring the human usability aspect of IT projects into play sooner than they would in traditional software waterfall development, which focuses almost exclusively on technical performance.
Four years ago, the IEEE stated, “Digitalization has greatly facilitated many areas of life and life without it is almost unthinkable today, [but it] should also be considered in which situations digitalization has made life more difficult for modern society.”
When customers can’t get easy answers and users experience fatal errors when trying to process the exceptions that occur in any business, digitalization isn’t working.
CIOs and project leads can rectify this situation by paying more rigorous attention to the human usability of systems.