I've long been of the opinion that part of our UX infrastructure should be a usability/UX/design database where we can track the results of all types of user research/design critiques, field data, and other types of data. The data can then be cataloged in many ways and allow UX and others to:
1. Look at common problems across different products as well as the same problem within a product. This would be useful for consistency (of many different types) and the development of patterns, standards, and guidelines. 2. Track the work of the team and metrics like the number of users, effort spent on testing. 3. Conduct meta-analyses across different products. 4. Track what gets fixed. and much more. With a database, you could tag problems in many ways and also tag user requirements (since one of the biggest problems in product design is obtaining good requirements). I've worked up an Access database as a pilot for a usability database and loaded it with over 5000 items from open-ended surveys, usability tests, user feedback, data from interviews, etc. If you set up your templates for recording data for your studies in something like Excel and use the same column headings, you can import into Access (as an example) and merge the results. With each set of data, you would indicate the type of study, the date, the method used, etc. You could tag something as an "idea", a "requirement", a "problem", or some other general tags and look across studies for patterns of different sorts. You could build a form as a front end to the database and allow others to access some aspects of the database. You could link to the reports themselves, but the database would allow you to slice and dice your data and do some powerful triangulation that would make your team very powerful and persuasive. I think that one of the flaws of our field is that we often gather immense amount of data, but have no easy way to look at it from different perspectives easily. Wikis allow some tagging, but I don't think that is sufficient from the kind of analyses that would yield significant benefits. If you develop a database, you will need to plan some education about what meta data are important and how to enter data consistently. Chauncey On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 4:17 AM, Audrey Crane <[email protected]> wrote: > I am working in an organization that is focused on doing quick, > lightweight usability research, especially once the work has a good > foundation: bringing a design into a coffee shop, for example, > running 5 quick (15 minute) studies, making changes, showing 3 more > people the next day, etc. > > In this model, I've seen things get revised and re-tested 10 or more > times. > > At the same time, there is a formal research organization that would > like to have all the results organized and indexed so they can find > them later. Ideally they'd like to have a standard report completed > for every round, but 10 reports is somewhat onerous. > > What the researchers are currently doing for the team is posting > video with 3-5 key takeaways from every session on basecamp. > > Does anyone have any experience with or suggestions for a solution > that: > - doesn't burden what's supposed to be a very lightweight / > flexible testing process > - makes materials available an at least a minimally organized fashion > so people later can search for things like "filter testing", or > whatever > - keeps people not immediately involved appraised of progress > ________________________________________________________________ > 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 > ________________________________________________________________ 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
