Boris Becker as Usability Consultant for SAP?
By Gerd Waloszek, SAP AG, Usability Engineering Center – 10/09/2000
During my summer holiday I had a strange dream: tennis star Boris Becker was announced consultant of the SAP Usability Engineering Center (UEC). Isn't that a strange idea? What does Boris Becker have to say about usability? Well, maybe that's exactly the point: "Usability is a topic to which anybody can contribute," a developer once pointed out to me. Also, Boris Becker has a certain image in Germany; aside from being a tennis professional, he's also a regular guy, not a bookish academic.
Don't we all have problems explaining what we do in our jobs when other people - be it our parents, relatives, or friends - ask us? Either we try to reiterate what's in our marketing brochures, using "company jargon" and "usability speak," or we oversimplify our explanations. We say things like, "We help make our software user-friendly" or something to that effect. Not very informative, but sufficient to make the person who asked the question quickly change the subject.
If it is so hard to explain to other people what we are doing, maybe that's one of the reasons why usability people are so little heard within companies - a problem throughout the whole HCI community? If we cannot reveal our goals and describe what we do in our daily work to our parents, why should we succeed with developers or members of the board? This is where Boris Becker comes to the rescue! He sacrifices his valuable time - for a hefty fee, of course - to find out in monthly meetings what the heck the usability team is doing, what it is planning for the future, what its problems are, and the like. Of course, he won't take any actions after such a meeting; he hasn't got the time. But the usability team now has, thanks to a written protocol, a couple of intelligible statements about these issues. These statements are so clear and enlightening that not only my mother could understand them, but also the board, the managers, the marketing department, and the developers.
Obviously, Boris Becker can't do this rewarding job for too long because slowly he will be corrupted by all those buzz words that make our job so important and incomprehensible to others. I am curious who after Boris could be our next usability - or should I say "comprehensibility"? - consultant. Maybe one of my future dreams will have the answer.
