What are some arguments against user experience testing?
Design research is just a tool. Sometimes this tool is very valuable in specific contexts, and in other cases it’s the wrong tool. IMHO, the biggest argument against design research is when it’s being improperly used. Garbage in, garbage out. In these cases, the output of the design research can be actively harmful, and you’re probably better off knowing nothing. The most common case of this has to do with the fact that when doing your user testing or user research, the tools and methodologies you use cannot perfectly capture the final product being used in the real world. As a result, you end up taking a bunch of shortcuts like: • Using a lower-fidelity prototype rather than the final prototype • Doing the design research in your environment and not in a real-life environment • For some products, like social products, not being able to replicate the product experience of an actual social community • Testing the product on new users, but not having enough time or a final enough product
My argument is a little long, if you want to read it in a better format then go here. http://000fff.org/getting-to-the… If you had an idea for a new hammer and you wanted to test it, which of the following ways do you think would yield you the most valuable feedback? I am guessing most of you would choose #4. After all, getting a feel for the hammer requires the customer to actually try it out. Looking at a picture of a hammer, cutting it out, or even providing a Styrofoam prototype simply won’t provide you or the customer with sufficient foundation on which to evaluate it. However, if I asked you to test a digital product, whether it be a website, an application or an e-commerce site, most of us would choose #1, 2 or 3. Isn’t that odd? A simple product like a hammer is best tested in its final form. But a digital product, that in some ways is much more complex, is tested by lesser means, as if you could extract important feedback about the hammer. Nonetheless, this is the current re
This is an interesting question. “What are arguments against user experience testing?” My initial response is that there are existing patterns that users are accustomed to, that if you make the controls and experience align to those patterns, you will not need to test such designs with users – they know it already and so the designs should be learnable and usable. Which, in many cases, is absolutely right… and it’s also completely wrong at the same time. Because the baseline – those reference standards that we are supposed to leverage – is changing ALL THE TIME. For example, touch interfaces, and the appropriate design approaches to support them, are now part of the design space that UX professionals live in and this wasn’t the case just three years ago. Controls don’t work the same and user’s expectations of how controls work change as well. And I’m not just talking about design patterns – the attitudes of users change based on the world around them. How do users think and feel? it’
The arguments I typically have seen tend not to be around the idea that it’s “not necessary”, but that people seem to think that they always know better how something should work than the people actually using their product, or that the people building the tool/application assume that they are sufficiently representative of the user base that they don’t need to do any UI research. And, finally, there’s the cost in both time and money associated with “real” UX work. It’s not a matter of just throwing something together and calling it “good” – to do it right, you have to take the time and effort to get in front of your customers, obtain their feedback, and integrate into the ongoing process. Depending on who your target users are, this can be exceptionally expensive.
