Business Analysts: Seize The Opportunity To Deliver Compelling User Experiences

Is anything more important than how users experience your Web sites and software applications? If your customers can't effectively and efficiently meet their goals by using your sites and apps, they will go elsewhere, leading to lost revenue and increased expense. If employees find sites or apps too hard to use, they become frustrated and less productive. To maximize productivity, smart organizations place a strong focus on user experience (UX) as part of the software development process, but not every firm has people with the right skills and focus on this important discipline. This is a great opportunity for business analysts, but it requires a shift in the way they define requirements. UX skills are often absent from business analysts' (BAs') tool kits, because BAs have been trained to engage "the business" to learn about requirements but not to do true user research that will deepen their understanding. By gaining key skills, performing user research, and actually "becoming" their application's end users while defining requirements, BAs can improve the user experience — and organizational outcomes — by helping create apps that are useful, usable, and desirable.