[IxDA Discuss] Asking questions to participants in a positiveor negative way ?

[chiwah liu]

Caroline said:

>
> As for time-consuming: it never ceases to amaze me that I meet such
> resistance to doing even a couple of informal interviews with
> users (say, half a day max) whereas organisations think nothing of sending
> out 1000 questionnaires just like that. Or even sending
> questionnaires to all their users!!! Strange, isn't it?
>


Hmmm... I work in a web agency and we are always very short both in time and
in money. We choose almost every time a quick and dirty method to do our
user research because our clients have never enough money. They also need to
get the website very fast because the advertising campaign is going to
happen within few months…

For example, now if our client wants to test our prototype, we might have
only about one month (or less) to do a whole user testing: survey the user,
find them, call them, create scenarios, do user testing on about 20 users
and of course give them the result and recommendation in less than one
month… Because the advertising campaign is coming soon and we can't be late
on schedule.



So now I am so used to very quick and dirty user research that it rather
sounds normal to choose the dirtiest and fastest method than the opposite.