Schaffer, the author of this book, is the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Human Factors International, Inc., a company specializing in usability engineering. The book fulfills its stated goals. It is not a book on usability; instead, the author addresses the challenge of making usability engineering fully integrated into the design and development processes of a company. This means that the content is somewhat dry and abstract, but the target audience--people who already understand usability and who now wish to move their organizations beyond the situation of considering usability as only an add-on, or a post-development fix when there is a crisis--will find meaningful lessons in the book. The book does contain testimonials by people from a variety of organizations, including the Social Security Administration, National Cancer Institute, A.G. Edwards and Sons, Staples, and Microsoft.

The step-by-step process presented consists of four phases: startup, setup, organization, and long-term operations. These phases are more differentiated than their labels may indicate. Issues addressed include the role of the executive champion; user-centered methodologies; testing facilities (photographs are included); decentralized, matrix, and centralized structures for the usability teams; choosing a good first project; and hiring consultants and offshore staff.

The book could be improved. It would have been beneficial to compare the institutionalization of usability with the institutionalization of other significant business strategies of the past, for example, quality or business process change. In addition, the diagrams were nearly illegible, including the larger versions of a few of the diagrams that are contained in the appendix.