[IxDA Discuss] Do you change who you are for participants?

[Melvin Jay Kumar]

Hi All,

I work in a globl environment and most of my projects are global in
nature. That means the applications / websites etc get used across the
major regions which are Amercas, Europe & Middles East and finally
Asia Pacific.

The way we do usability testing is that  the test
administrators/moderators are rarely the designers. We feel that there
would be some bias of some sort ( there is quite a bit of research to
support this also) unintentionally if the testing is done by the
designers themselves.

However, there are circumstance, where we had no choice because of the
number. of projects going on that the test moderators were the people
responsible for the design. But even in those circumstance, which tend
to be rare, we have a structured process, whereby we use standard
scripts for responses so that the bias does not creep it. The test
plans and moderation results are also reviewed by others to remove any
bias questions or related materials.

So the designers are not allowed to identify themselves as designers
but as test moderators. They adopt the role they are playing and read
of the script. We keep this theme across all testing so that over
time, everyone understands that testing and the design is diifferent
process and the purpose is different.

We also communicate the purpose of usability testing in ever test
sessions and make sure they understand it is about improving the user
expereince and not about testing the users.

This is our process and we continue to tweak the process to better
align to our organizations and the environment we work in.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Jay Kumar


On 11/6/07, margaret <malschultz at comcast.net> wrote:
> We ran a recent usability study and it was brought up in the post mortem
> that perhaps users would be more comfortable if they didn't know we were the
> designers. Not only 'more comfortable' and 'more honest' but also maybe less
> 'eager to please.'
>
> Have you ever slightly altered who you are in order to obtain more honest
> data from your users? I'm not talking about lying, but maybe being slightly
> misleading or vague as to what your role is with the company.
>
> Did you feel it was successful? Or do you think this is a pointless tactic?
>
>
> Thanks,
> Margaret
>
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