Why keep it to yourself? Getting everyone on the team to do usability testing
Teams that gather constant input from users design better experiences.
Multi-disciplinary teams create better experiences. Teams that make great
experiences are willing to change what they're doing in response to what they
learn as they observe people using their designs.
Everyone in your organization wants to design better user experiences, and they
know they need data to inform the decisions they make. But you're just one
person. One person on a larger team where roles are exclusive, and skills are
varied. We all know that the best way to make design decisions is to know users
by watching them, listening to them. Ideally, everyone on a team would be keen
to gather data from users. More importantly, they'd all have the skills to do
it. Because one person can't do it all.
Let's teach them. Let's teach everyone on every team how to do usability
testing.
In this session, we'll talk about
- The essential skills for conducting usability tests and doing user research.
They're easier to gain than you might expect.
- What happens when everyone on the team can gather data from users. I'll share
stories of people in varied disciplines conducting usability tests and user
research and what they learned.
- How to teach people who aren't usability specialists to get useful data out
of sessions with users. I'll talk about what to focus on to get everyone on the
team started.
If you're the person on your team who has been doing basic user research and
usability testing, this session will help you help your team help you.
If you're a team member who wants to do usability testing or other user
research but feel you just don't know how, you'll gain skills and inspiration
here that you'll be able to use tomorrow.
comments
I agree with Joe. I find that if I have someone observe or facilitate one session, the react to what they saw in that one session and want to make design changes based on that alone. I have to emphasize that they look at the summary data, because although one person may have struggled completing a task, they may have been the only one.
It'd be great, Dana, to also spend some significant time on analysis of observations & data. Just because we teach someone how to conduct guerilla usability testing or how to use Morae doesn't mean they have the same perspicacity that a trained, dedicated UX researcher does. IOW, perhaps you can have a section entitled, "But what does it mean?"