observation | Dana Chisnell

I’ve seen it dozens of times. The team meets after observing people use their design, and they’re excited and energized by what they saw and heard during the sessions. They’re all charged up about fixing the design. Everyone comes in with ideas, certain they have the right solution to the remedy frustrations users had. Then what happens?

On a super collaborative team everyone is in the design together, just with different skills. Splendid! Everyone was involved in the design of the usability test, they all watched most of the sessions, they participated in debriefs between sessions. They took detailed, copious notes. And now the “what ifs” begin:

What if we just changed the color of the icon? What if we made the type bigger? What if we moved the icon to the other side of the screen? Or a couple of pixels? What if? Continue reading Ending the opinion wars: fast, collaborative design direction

The team I was working with wanted to find out whether a prototype they had designed for a new intranet worked for users. Their new design was a radical change from the site that had been in place for five years and in use by 8,000 users. Going to this new design was a big risk. What if users didn’t like it? Worse, what if they couldn’t use it?

We went on tour. Not to show the prototype, but to test it. Leading up to this moment we had done heaps of user research: stakeholder interviews, field observations (ethnography, contextual inquiry – pick your favorite name), card sorting, taxonomy testing. We learned amazing things, and as our talented interaction designer started translating all that into wireframes, we got pressure to show them. We knew what we were doing. But we wanted to be sure. So we made the wireframes clickable and strung them together to make them feel like they were doing something. And then we asked (among other things): Continue reading Looking for love: Deciding what to observe for