This will be a bit of a rant. I don’t want to say I’ve seen it all—I am sure that I have not—but I have seen enough to want to rail against the idea that a good user experience can be crafted by consultants brought in for a short or even medium-term project.
I am a big believer in doing direct research with actual users to learn about them:
- Their needs, or the tasks they wish to accomplish using your application.
- The pressure they are under to get their work done, to be accurate and whatever other criteria determine their success or failure.
- The physical environment and tools they work in and use.
- Their own experience using software tools.
- Their mental model for the work they are doing.
I’ve worked for small software development shops where my opportunity to do user research consisted of an hour during a project kick-off meeting where I got to ask the project stakeholders questions about users. Tell me: how many questions have you successfully had answered by a small roomful of people who are sitting around a conference table waiting to have the catered lunch delivered?
At the other end of the spectrum, I have moderated task-focused usability tests where for 40 minutes or so I have the full attention of a single user to work with a fully-designed prototype of a series of pages, asking them to try what I hope are real tasks, to see if the interface made it possible for them to succeed. And I and a small group of colleagues have observed carefully what happened in that session, and the nine others we did that week. And repeated that process every two weeks on a regular schedule. And when that application went into production, we kept tabs on the analytics of page views, time on page and completion of tasks. This is commitment to understanding users!
I believe you will have made a correct decision about which approach to understanding users yields higher-quality, deeper knowledge and enables better decision-making about the user interface and interaction for those users.
Relying on ‘best practices’ only goes so far, but that is the best a consultant can do when working on the basis of a few weeks’ acquaintance with the project. The relationship between your user experience team and your users is not speed dating, it’s long term.
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