Tag: observers

Observers are your friends

 

(This article was originally published on May 30, 2008. This is a refresh.)

 

Research that you do alone ends up in only your head. No matter how good the report, slide deck, or highlights video, not all the knowledge gets transferred to your teammates. This isn’t your fault. It just is.

So what to do? Enlist as many people on your team as possible to help you by observing your usability testing sessions. You can even give your observers jobs, such as time-keeper if you’re measuring time on task. Or, if you are recording sessions, it could be an observer’s job to start and stop the recordings and to label and store them properly.

The key is to involve the other people on the team – even managers – so they can

  • help you
  • learn from participants
  • share insights with you and other observers
  • buy in
  • reach consensus on what the issues are and how to solve them

Who should observe: Everyone

Ideally, everyone on the design and development team should observe sessions. Every designer, every programmer, every manager on the project should watch as real people use their designs. People on the wider team who are making design decisions should also observe sessions. I’m talking about QA testers, project managers, product managers, product owners, legal people, compliance people, operations people — everyone.

Continue reading Observers are your friends

Consensus on observations in real time: Keeping a rolling list of issues

 

Design teams often need results from usability studies yesterday. Teams I work with always want to start working on observations right away. How to support them while giving good data and ensuring that the final findings are valid?

Teams that are fully engaged in getting feedback from users – teams that share a vision of the experience they want their users to have – have often helped me gather data and evaluate in the course of the test. In chatting with Livia Labate, I learned that the amazing team at Comcast Interactive Media (CIM) came to the same technique on their own. Crystal Kubitsky of CIM was good enough to share photos of CIM’s progress through one study. Here’s how it works:

 

1. Start noting observations right away

After two or three participants have tried the design, we take a longer break to debrief about what we have observed so far. In that debrief, each team member talks about what he or she has observed. We write it down on a white board and note which participants had the issue. The team works together to articulate what the observation or issue was. Continue reading Consensus on observations in real time: Keeping a rolling list of issues