(I know better than this. But I haven't had enough coffee to have good judgment yet.)
On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 1:03 AM, Thomas Petersen <[email protected]> wrote: > > What happens often is that those responsible for the usability tests > provides their findings to the designers but that there is no actual > transcendence from the usability testing phase into the actual design > and development phase. > > This sounds like a communication problem, not a process problem. Any process is only as good as your willingness to work it. > A much better approach IMHO is do you research, design the monkey and > let it loose in the jungle. THEN look at how users behave. > > In most cases that gives you plenty of information about what to do > or not to do and whether to invite users of your product or not for > qualitative studies. > > To torture your metaphor: If you design the monkey, put it in the wild, and then come to realize that maybe it should have opposable thumbs, it takes radical surgery to add thumbs. And it's not guaranteed to work; more often than not, you'll end up with a Franken-monkey with thumb-like appendages. But, on the other hand, if you could somehow animate the monkey's skeleton early on, you could observe it struggling to open a banana and quickly realize "Oh, hey. Thumbs would be good." Then you can add thumbs into the design early on, when you still have time to recognize the impact of thumbs and adjust the rest of the monkey to accommodate (i.e., "Maybe we don't need those nostril-flaps and muscles to allow the monkey to block out bad smells now; he can just pinch his nose closed."). Testing early helps you adapt early so that you can avoid costly rework. (Not to mention not squandering the goodwill of your first wave of users.) I hear you saying you value the ideas behind usability testing, but that your negative experiences with it have invalidated it for you. "I've not been successful with it" is a very different thing than "it doesn't work." Will Sansbury ________________________________________________________________ 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
