ABSTRACT
This chapter presents innovation and creativity essential to creating a space for usability in the actual design process, particularly when working in an environment that is not always conducive to a user-centred design process. It describes a flexible approach which improves the overall usability of the Information Map Studio (IMS) product in several tangible ways. The respective time constraints, coupled with strong user-centred design philosophy, have motivated to create methods for gathering user input efficiently, without abandoning the collaborative approaches that have worked so well. The goal of usability testing was to assess the effect of the changes and to establish a usability benchmark to set a reference point against which future performance would be measured. The key advantages of IMS for business users are that it is flexible in terms of the number of questions it can answer and timely in that users can immediately run queries specific to their business needs on demand.
