[IxDA Discuss] aquire usability labrats

[Robert Hoekman, Jr.]

You have time to do all that? And the will power? ;)

I'm definitely not convinced this is the way to go. It's expensive, time
consuming, ends up looking a lot like design-by-committee, and only
produces, as you say, "pretty good results".

We're the IxDs here, right? Aren't we supposed to be the experts? If I'm
doing my job well, my company should be able to rely on *my* expert analysis
and recommendations instead of hiring outsiders to tell the stakeholders
what they should be able to gain in-house.

-r-


On 5/17/06, Lada Gorlenko <lada at acm.org> wrote:
>
> [Please voluntarily trim replies to include only relevant quoted
> material.]
>
> SA> If you have coorporate products which you want to test in a
> SA> usability lab. Hoewever the products are secret you probably don't
> SA> want to test outside users nor you probably want programmers to be
> SA> subject of the tests.
>
> User tests are not the only evaluation option; have you thought of
> doing expert (heuristic) reviews?
>
> As Mitchell noted, end users and NDAs may not always go together hand
> in hand. On the other hand, if you can afford usability experts, they
> all will be familiar with NDAs. Granted, expert review is not user
> evaluation; however, it is often a solid trade off.
>
> The way we do Expert Reviews in my team:
>
> 1. Recruit 5-6 UX experts with different specialisations, such as
> graphic design, IxD, software engineering, cognitive science,
> accessibility, instruction design, etc. -- whatever is more relevant
> to your product.
>
> 2. Prepare usage scenarios and user tasks in the same way as you would
> do for user evaluation; supplement them by personas/user profiles.
>
> 3. Distribute personas and tasks among experts so that:
> -- each persona is covered by at least two experts;
> -- each task is performed by at least half of the experts.
>
> 4. Ask experts to look at the product from two angles:
> -- of their persona
> -- of their specialisation.
>
> If you do your prep work right, you'll get pretty good results. This
> will not work for interfaces requiring deep knowledge of a specific
> domain (e.g., medicine, business process modelling, etc.), but it
> works well for general usage products.
>
> Lada
>
>
>
>
>
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