[IxDA Discuss] aquire usability labrats

[Mitchell Gass]

At 04:28 AM 5/17/2006, Simon Asselbergs wrote:
>If you have coorporate products which you want to test in a 
>usability lab. Hoewever the products are secret...How to get proper 
>test-persons, or make good contracts? Has anyone experience in this?

This is the most common situation for products I test. To get valid 
results from any usability test, the participants have to be 
representative of the people the product will serve. The 
corporation's legal staff will have non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) 
that you can have participants sign; the only question is whether 
NDAs intended for other audiences, such as outside contractors, are 
too long or intimidating for test participants. It's often possible - 
but only with the help of the corporation's legal staff - to prepare 
an NDA for test participants that's just a page or so long.

If a product is so secret that you can't reveal information about it 
to anyone, the best approach is probably to do the thorough user 
research and user modeling done at firms like Cooper. If your models 
- such as personas - are sufficiently detailed and based on solid 
research, you can use them to predict many or most of the usability 
problems you would discover in conventional usability testing.

Regards,

Mitchell Gass
uLab | PDA: Learning from Users | Designing with Users
Berkeley, CA 94707 USA
+1 510 525-6864 voice
+1 510 525-4246 fax
http://www.participatorydesign.com/