We made it reliable. What's next? Usability?

Question

I'm working in a small development group. We are building and improving our product.

Half a year ago we couldn't think about higher characteristics, such as usability, because we had so many problems with our product. Many bugs, high technical debt, low performance and other problems kept us from being able to focus on usability.

With time we've improved our process substantially. What we've done:

• Real Agile iterations
• Continuous integration
• Testing(unit-tests, functional Smoke tests, performance)
• Code quality is 'good'
• Painless deployment process

So we are now producing stable, reliable releases. The following quote (paraphrased) describes our current situation:

first - make it work; after that, make it reliable; after that, make it usable

We are geeks, so we can't 'make' a great UI by ourselves. So what should we do? What direction can you recommend? Maybe we should hire Usability experts part-time or full-time? How can we explain the importance of Usability to our stakeholders? How do we convince them that this is useful?

Answer 1

What do your Business people say will make you the most money? Do that. Maybe usability is the next thing to do, maybe more features, maybe a different product. It's not something a "geek" will necessarily be able to guess.