Microsoft India
Improving Product Usability Thru Six Sigma
Today, the competitive marketplace demands the best of everything – the best quality, reduced costs and a perfect schedule. This is the new standard that demanding customers expect, and good suppliers continually strive to meet. It is not an easy task to meet these challenges without compromising high quality levels OR the schedule OR the cost.
Quality is not just about having a defect-free product which meets the requirements. If your product does not take care of usability – it will directly impact your product adoption. Usability is an implied need which is not normally stated explicitly but the user expects it to be there and its absence will impact your business.
People have different views/perceptions about usability – but there is no standard gauge/measure with which you can claim that your product has good usability or not. The gauge I try using is – if the user feels the product is not usable OR has difficulty in using it – your product has usability problems – no matter what process/tools you have used for usability. It’s hard to find if your product meets usability expectations or not. You may find your product not meeting product usability expectations when it is too late to make any changes. The key to success is “doing it right the first time, every time”; using data-driven scientific methods for usability in product design and getting indications of product usability early in the development cycle.
The Customer is always right. If you ignore your customers – they will ignore your product
There is no silver bullet; you can make a product which meets the usability expectations of users by planning it upfront, managing it with the right set of matrices and leveraging some industry recognized tools. It’s about understanding your audience/users/customers – your product is used by experts, novice and executives – it’s not one or other – your product should take care of usability for all of them.
In this presentation, Mukesh will talk about techniques that can be used to improve the usability of your product and how you can plan to do the right thing and get the right things for the right user. He will also share his experience on how he leveraged some of the Six Sigma tools in Microsoft (USA) to improve usability of Microsoft Outlook.
Mukesh Jain is head of Quality in Microsoft India, leading Six Sigma, TSP/PSP, SDLC, MOF, Process Improvements and Business Intelligence initiatives. In the past 11 years, he has held various positions such as Developer, QA, Project Manager and Quality Manager. He has led multinational companies in India with TSP/PSP, ITIL, Six Sigma, ISO 9000 and SEI CMM Level 3-5 implementation and certification. He has worked in Microsoft USA for 5 years in the Business Productivity division before returning to India in June 2004.
An Engineer in Computer science, Mukesh is also an SEI Authorized TSP Launch Coach, PSP Instructor, SEI Certified PSP Developer & Engineer, ISO 9000 Internal Auditor, CQA, CQIA, CSQA, CSTE and Master-Microsoft Office Specialist.
He served the American Society for Quality (ASQ) as Secretary (2000-2003). He was also Vice President, International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) for the year 2001. As an executive committee member, he organized TUG Asia 2005 in India in March 2005. He has written several papers on the subject of software quality and project management and presented them in Microsoft and other companies and at international conferences, including IEEE, QAI, ASQ, SPIN, PNSQC, PMI & SEI.