[IxDA Discuss] (no subject)

[Katie Albers]

Heaven save me from the User Acceptance Test....

1) Is that your aim? "acceptance"? Not delight, not pleasure, not 
relief, not excellence, but "acceptance"? Aim higher

2) User Acceptance Testing frequently goes hand in hand with 
statements like "Marketing *is* the users. They defined the 
requirements." and there are so many things wrong with that statement 
I cannot even begin to go into it.

3) UAT tends to be all about the function...not the user. Does this 
piece of SW do what we want it to do? In other words, it's standard 
QA with a different group of testers.

About 10 years ago I worked with a stellar group of people, including 
IxD and usability folk, developing Web sites of various ilks and for 
a long time our decor included a box of the sort SW usually comes in 
that had been made into "Web Site in a Box Only 29.99, includes 
links, branding, and usability" *We* knew it was a joke -- we also 
knew that it was what we were always getting asked for ("It shouldn't 
take more than 3 weeks to do a redesign of our corporate site, right? 
You just change the colors and move the buttons.")

I think User Acceptance Testing -- like Focus Groups -- belongs in 
marketing (if it belongs anywhere at all -- which is a whole 
different discussion), when you're still deciding whether it's a good 
idea to Make That Thing. But still, only in those cases where That 
Thing fits within a recognizable group of Things. No focus group and 
no UAT would ever have predicted that VisiCalc was a good idea (and 
would be used for myriad applications in unforeseen fields like Naval 
Engineering).

It's another example that among the most critical things to know are 
What to ask, who to ask, when to ask it, how to ask it, and what the 
answers mean and don't mean.

And you won't get that in a box for 49.99 :)

katie

At 10:57 AM +0800 11/1/07, Kaisen Wang wrote:
>I totally agree with what Jay Kumar is saying, that suddenly so many
>companies are offering usability that it's getting unreal.
>
>It also quickly becomes obvious that these companies do not know what they
>are talking about when they start to refer to "Usability Test" as "User
>Acceptance Test (UAT)", which to them basically involves giving the
>prototype to users to use, and get them to write down their comments, and
>fill in a likert scale survey to rate how good it is. There is no moderator,
>no actual test, no asking of users to find out their motivations etc..
>
>As for UT being offered for 49.99, which company is actually doing that?
>It'll be interesting to find out...
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Katie Albers
User Experience Consulting & Project Management
katie at firstthought.com