Larry O’Brien on User Testing
A couple weeks back (which means it’s now available on the Web), Larry O’Brien covered user testing to show that development shops could actually, you know, see how users work with a software tool.
Nut grafs:
There’s a part of me that loves user testing; the same part that enjoys visiting ThereIFixedIt.com and watching videos of people destroying their trucks by felling trees on top of them. I take comfort in believing, however briefly, that there are people more foolish than myself. My source code often makes me despair of my own sentience, but I like to tell myself that I wouldn’t need to be prompted to use a button marked “search.”
My major reaction to user testing, though, is often resignation. User testing invariably reveals distasteful work—layouts that need total reworking, dead-end navigation paths, and corner cases that the library API doesn’t cover. The interesting algorithmic stuff that you developed while surrounded by a stack of heavily annotated journal articles and intently pored over on a statement-by-statement basis? That stuff works fine.
Unfortunately, the temptation to skip user testing is often encouraged by clients. While experienced developers know that user testing will lead to a certain amount of dismay, inexperienced clients dismiss user testing because they’re invariably overconfident. I don’t think many are as bad as my above-mentioned client, who was confident that word would spread like wildfire that one could cycle colors by directly clicking on the product. More generally, the problem is the opposite: Clients have seen so many mockups and prototypes and test versions that they cannot see it with fresh eyes.
Keep in mind, QA, in all the situations where your organization is too cheap to provide user testing, you have to be the eyes of the user. Designers love their cutting edge design, but applications should not make only as much sense as a Christo or Serra installation. Applications should behave more or less like all the other applications in the whole world regardless for how much disdain the developers have for the bourgeois sensibilities of users. And so on and so forth.
But read O’Brien’s piece as usual.
