"Well, that's unfortunate. " Not really.
"I'm not entirely sure what you mean by paradigms in this context. Perhaps you mean a function we've never seen before? In any case, you will generally find that very few users want problems or issues. They want functions. They want to be able to find those functions, and perform them with minimal exertion. And that's why we test." Who talks about wanting problems? They HAVE problems/issues and you need to understand what those are. "Of course, they can, as long as they have the users' input. What appears to be a completely reasonable process, or an obvious button, or a clear name to someone working on the creation of an interface is likely to turn out to be obscure, hard to follow or incomprehensible when you put it in front of actual users. I suspect that everyone who tests throughout the process has had the experience of a test in which the "perfect element" turns out to be something that none of the users gets. " Which could might as well be a problem of testing an unfinished product. None the less personally I have found much better value in testing the actual product/service rather than a pseudo scenario. It seems that many UCD proponents completely ignore how big an impact the actual real environment have on the experience of usability and are more intersted in the process leading up to the design and development. A button might not make sense when you experience it on a screen but if it's experienced in the actual context things often change quite drastically. A roll over or other choreopgraphy or a well designed layout can do all the difference. "But you can test all the elements that are going in to the product. If no one notices the critical button on the second step even though your visual designer went to great lengths to position it and color it and so forth, precisely to make it obvious, it's better to know that before you've built an entire product that relies on users pressing that button." You are assuming that when the visual designer "goes to greath length" they don't understand anything about usability in general otherwise the above example is absurd. Why should the user know better where the button should be positioned? It is obvious that if you really where in such a situation where a button you went to great extent to figure out where should be positioned by highlighting it, still don't do the trick you are dealing with a completely different problem that have nothing to do with asking the users, but rather doing AB tests to figure out where you have most success. "Jakob's site is built to highlight Jakob's group's expertise. It does so admirably. To generalize from that very particular example to "what Jakob thinks all sites should be like" is foolish in the extreme." When did I say that Jakob Nielsen said anything about how all sites should look like? Can you at least respond to what I write instead of creating claims I never made. "In each of these cases the goal is the same: It's a lot cheaper to find something wrong on a piece or earlier in the process and correct it then than it is to have to go back and redevelop the whole product to set things right that you should have corrected months ago. " All that would make sense if testing would rid us of bad products/services. Yet what often happens is that the process becomes such a piece of committee work that it loosens clarity and focus. UCD is not by any means an insurance against bad feature decisions it's not even an insurance against bad usability. "It's like building a house on an improperly laid foundation. It's cheaper to fix the foundation alone than it is to fix the whole house." It's nothing at all like building a house, since building a house doesn't mean having the users of the house testing the foundation. They wouldn't know the difference most of the times. That is why you have experts with experience who know what they are doing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=46278 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
