I haven’t checked out About Face 3 yet – did you read 2 or 1? How does 3 compare?

Really interesting idea about using suitability (to users at a given competence level) as an aspect of competitive analysis – I love it!

Also I see this as an interesting approach to evaluate competitors. We may ask people to do same tasks in various products and compare results.

It also sounds like you experienced something with similar impact as collaborative effects – there’s an interesting article in the Harvard Business Review about how collaborative learning can accelerate / invalidate the projected learning rate defined by experience curves. http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bigshift/2009/04/introducing-the-collaboration.html.

Great real-world data too, I’m sure it will help other folks here! I appreciate it.

Over the strenuous objections of the vendor, we created entirely new interfaces for the users. Only things users would be required to do were presented and they were all in one menu and labeled in terms users knew. For example:
Enter Billing
My Billings
My Late Customers

Then we wrote “How To” guides with pictures walking users through each step with pictures. Again the ERP/CRM vendor strenuously complained that users should “discover” new ways of doing tasks. At this point we fired all the vendors consultants.

It all seemed unnecessarily simple to the vendor and they hated that we renamed everything and created non-standard forms. However, by greatly simplifying the interface and defining precise processes for everything we wanted users to do, we moved the whole company from “novice” to what the vendor would call “expert”. There definiation of expert was based on what one could expect a standard user to be able to do and how long it would take to get them there.

In 2 months, we had created a star/example consultant. Sheis 67 years old, doesn’t own a computer or cell phone, but she is loading documents into our portal for distribution to our clients and having clients return documents to her through our portal. This is in addition to billing, tracking and updating customer information.

Basic training that defines what “competent” is and gives precise steps that novice, inexperienced or resistant users can follow can really raise the bar of productivity and performance. Just one example presents this benefit. Our company distributes 4 to 6 documents a year to 6,000 clients and it costs $4 to ship a document one way. We will cut our shipping costs by about two-thirds and pay for the system in its first year.

Thanks for a great theoretical presentation of what we were doing for practical purposes without thinking about the theoretical underpinnings.