On Oct 6, 2009, at 3:09 AM, Jonas Söderström wrote:
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!)
I'm glad _somebody_ liked it. :) Thank you!
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?
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?
Or should we make the users try our gradually developed prototypes
of the new product, in session after session?
I'm going to disagree with Adrian here and say there is a lot of value
to having the team watch users with the existing version. If you
structure the study right, you'll learn a lot about:
1) Who your users are
2) What they are trying to do with the product
3) How the product fits into their life
4) How they talk about the elements of the application (their
terminology and conceptual models)
5) What doesn't currently work (and needs attention)
6) What does currently work (and needs to not be broken in a future
release)
7) How you'll create elements that'll migrate people who are happy
with key features of the existing design into the new design (aka
"embraceable change")
In my experience, many teams that jump into the new version without
having that background initially discover is that they haven't a clue
what they should really be changing.
There's nothing mutually exclusive about these two approaches. You can
test the new ideas along side the existing design. There's no reason
you can't be collecting information about a new rendition of feature A
while testing the current usage of feature B.
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?
The most important thing is that team members understand their users
and their users' needs well enough to make good decisions. Persona
development is a great way to formally capture this information, but
it's not necessary. You need to assess what each team member knows
about the users and create a process and culture to fill in the gaps.
Hope that helps,
Jared
Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
510 Turnpike St., Suite 102, North Andover, MA 01845
e: [email protected] p: +1 978 327 5561
http://uie.com Blog: http://uie.com/brainsparks Twitter: @jmspool
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