Day: October 28, 2011

1) Agile development is feedback driven. 2) Development teams need to keep testing quick, simple, and frequent. 3) Agile UX must be flexible. It must respond to end user feedback and market changes in one iteration (one week). That is what ScreenZest provides for them. It is better than other methods of user validation like…

Agile development is feedback driven. Here are some ways salesforce.com facilitates testing: The company uses simple screen-sharing software (GoToMeeting) to share prototypes electronically. Testers pass control of mouse and keyboard to their users to watch them work. A simple conference call lets a facilitator talk to users and lets the user explain likes, dislikes, and…

InterviewsInterviews are structured one-on-one question and answer sessions. They are investigative in nature so the intent is to gain understanding in areas that are unclear. The majority of interview questions are “open” and conversational, instead of “closed” and quantitative. For example, an interviewer might ask, “What does our competitor do better than we do?” to…

Cultivate a group for continuous user validationUX people build up a pool of users they collaborate with to validate design before and after it’s built. This pool of users needs to be large enough that the designer doesn’t call on the same user repeatedly every week – but rather talks with them every month or…

Narrowing the gap between gathering usability data and acting on it. From the software developers’ viewpoint, they can no longer manage the slow pace of formal usability testing. Instead the require faster and more iterative informal testing, by asking for customer feedback on features and also having IT developers in other parts of the company…

UX Metrix is selling an online self-initiated feedback service. Testing produces customer loyalty and reduces support cost. Common problems with testing: MemoryIt’s not uncommon to observe people struggling through a website and afterwards they say it was “easy enough.” Surveys are particularly bad at uncovering “memory” issues, because time passed between the user’s actual experience…