On Selling Usability

If anybody is having issues with the notion of "selling usability" here are a few resources to pull from:

• John Rhode's Interview on Selling Usability
• Selling Usability by John Rhodes (Amazon link)
• UXMatters on Selling User Experience
  
• UXMatters on Evangelizing UX
• Selling Usability During a Recession

Part of selling usability, in my opinion, is also making sure to include additional stakeholders (other than the users) within the process--especially since users aren't always the customers and it might be harder to sell usability if there's not that direct connection to the almighty dollar. Here are just a couple of links discussing involving stakeholders in the user experience process:

• Setting up business stakeholder interviews
• Communicating effectively with stakeholders and clients
• #6 on this list of top reasons for poor usability states "too many stakeholders" - just keep that in mind as well.
  

The other thing to keep in mind is that a lot of projects you may find yourself on you may run into issues of a project manager who views a project as their "baby" and becomes the chief impediment to fixing problems because they designed/coded it originally and they know what their product should be (in cases like that, if you can move to a different team, I recommend it--let the manager kill their own product). The other thing you will probably run into a decent amount is where everybody on a team uses the product and considers themselves a "user" and argue that they know what's best in terms of usability--that's where video clips of users flailing around the product are particularly helpful in convincing team members that a problem exists.

Balsamiq as mockup tool?

Keith suggested using Balsamiq, maybe. (http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups)

It looks pretty, though I wondered if the widgets could be interactive.

Stephen