Global cost of poor HCD in IT

Roger Sessions has a great post on the cost of IT failure. His estimate, including direct costs and lost opportunity costs, is USD 6.18 Trillion. Almost enough to make a banker interested.

How much of this could have been prevented by applying Human Centred Design , usability assurance? Perhaps half?

For the UK, his figures (in B USD) are
GDP 2260
Cost of IT failure 200

If usability represented about 10% of IT spend, then in the UK it would be a USD 6B business. So, at say 1.5 dollars to the pound, and GBP 150k per usability person (including overheads etc.) that would be 28,000 usability people in the UK. Some room for growth there, I suspect.

His numbers come from WITSA. I didn't find the document. A google search of the site found 1 reference to the word usability (not a particularly focused reference) and none to ergonomics.

Quality = ease of use

Pure Digital's Simon Fleming-Wood(Flip video camera) defines quality entirely in terms of ease of use. He says "We will always prioritize accessibility over features".

This appears in the Wired article 'The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine'.

The article says much that is not new. Which? magazine has been banging on for a long time about how people like VW Beetle (original not retro) technology and dislike 'featuritis'. However, it has some interesting observations about the potential for mini-clinics, which I suspect that the current NHS plans will not realise for us in the UK

We need some tools to be able to relate Quality In Use to price point; the usability community has kept itself 'pure' by ignoring the framing that price brings.

Big system drivers - The Silent Dictators

The wonderful Hazel Courteney wrote a paper with the title 'Project Requirements: the Silent Dictators' , inspiring the title for this post.
Testimony by Dr Robert Zubrin included the following:

"Over the course of its history, NASA has employed two distinct modes of operation. The first prevailed during the period from 1961-1973, and may therefore be called the Apollo Mode. The second, prevailing since 1974, may usefully be called the Shuttle Era Mode (or Shuttle Mode, for short).

In the Apollo Mode, business is conducted as follows: First, a destination for human spaceflight is chosen. Then a plan is developed to achieve this objective. Following this, technologies and designs are developed to implement that plan. These designs are then built, after which the mission is flown.

The Shuttle Mode operates entirely differently. In this mode, technologies and hardware elements are developed in accord with the wishes of various technical communities. These projects are then justified by arguments that they might prove useful at some time in the future when grand flight projects are initiated.

Contrasting these two approaches, we see that the Apollo Mode is destination-driven, while the Shuttle Mode pretends to be technology-driven but is actually constituency-driven. In the Apollo Mode, technology development is done for mission-directed reasons. In the Shuttle Mode, projects are undertaken on behalf of various internal and external technical community pressure groups and then defended using rationales. In the Apollo Mode, the space agency’s efforts are focused and directed. In the Shuttle Mode, NASA’s efforts are random and entropic.

...

Comparing these two records, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that NASA’s productivity in both missions accomplished and technology development during its Apollo Mode was at least ten times as great as under the current Shuttle Mode."

H/T to Shlock Vaidya.

How cheap airlines can be cheap and what you get for it

From FlowingData comes this great graphic by 5WGraphics (click on the picture to see all of it).

Some of the numbers at the bottom look like they are not independent e.g. seat density and utilization, but the ability to relate costs to aspects of quality in use is striking.

At a macro-system level, would having only cheap airlines lead to no new aircraft types?