Hi Jonas,
On 6 Oct 2009, at 08:09, Jonas Söderström wrote:
Jared,
loved your post about getting the team to observe users, instead of
doing traditional usability tests. (Loved the way you presented the
same thoughts at IA Summit in Miami last year, too, btw!)
Let's say we're developing a new version of an existing service.
Based on the insights from your research - what do you think would
be the best strategy?
I'm not Jared - but my personal experience would be to avoid this:
To stick with letting the team watch users use the existing version
- and thus, over the project, collect richer and richer real
experience, and trust that the teams design skills will provide us
with good solutions for the new version?
and do this:
Or should we make the users try our gradually developed prototypes
of the new product, in session after session?
There's only so much information you can get from the product as it
stands. Once you start changing the design some of that information
becomes invalid. Maybe v2.0 does make doing Foo much easier, but has
it made doing Bar much harder? You need to validate the new design
decisions that you're making - and learn from the feedback.
Discovering more information about the old product is going to become
less and less useful as the old and new products diverge.
BTW, do the successfull teams require their team members to document
their observations of users? Or is it more efficient to let them use
this input and the insights in an informal way?
I personally find informal mechanisms to be much more effective.
However - unless you can spent significant amounts of time with the
team you may need to fall back to more formal communication
mechanisms. That said - I find informal techniques so much more
effective I'd fight quite hard to change the environment so I can use
them :-)
Cheers,
Adrian
--
http://quietstars.com - twitter.com/adrianh - delicious.com/adrianh
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