Getting buy-in to introduce usability testing

First, check out this video of Dr. House speaking to a patient who didn’t know how to use an inhaler. It’s a really good starting point in communicating the fact that there are times when users are just….dumb.

Instead of putting the blame on users and leaving it at that, there are times when it is more sensible and worthwhile to invest in finding the issues our users are facing and uncover root causes of their frustrations. Usability testing to the rescue.

If you ask any UX professional out there on what they think about usability testing, I’m guessing everyone will say stuff along the lines of – Awesome, Absolutely critical, Important, The Qualitative Input we got was priceless.

It’s a great idea, and the sad part is when it stays as an idea, and not part of the product development processes. As a realist, I’m a believer that every piece of investment must be justified and make economical sense, that includes usability testing.

So how do we get buy-in to have it introduced?
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Coupling between systems and what it means to UX

The topic for today is coupling.

It’s a programming term, so i’m pretty sure its hard to explain to non-technical audiences like my mom, so instead of trying your best to define and give example of how systems are coupled or not… think of it like the construction of towers.
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Building the Minimum User Journey

Large_Lego_store

Lets take a step back and imagine…you were just a small kid, and your dad brought you to this amazing Lego shop. And you, being that crazy Lego fanatic would just beg and beg your dad to let you buy some Lego.

Dad then went on to say: “Sure thing kiddo, I’ll let you pick any Lego sets.”

Your eyes widen in anticipation.

“But remember you only have $100 to spend on toys this year, not a penny more.”

Ok that’s not fun. $100 is a lot of money to a small kid, one things for sure it’s not enough to buy every Lego set in the store. What you would most likely do next is stress yourself out, think long and hard on which Lego set should you pick, is it worth the investment, will it be fun to play for the whole year, and go crazy.

That’s a tough call

Tough. Exactly the situation we face everyday in software projects, you would like to build everything but with project realities like budgeting constraints, resourcing, skills, technological limitations, release milestones and more….it’s basically impossible.

Deciding on what to build is tricky, prioritising that backlog on what features to build first is equally as bad, so rather than sitting back and admitting defeat, what could we do?

Designing Interactions: Status

trafficlight

Photo courtesy of flickr user tasuki

Traffic lights are ubiquitous and can be found in almost any city in the world. Whether it’s a pedestrian crossing, road intersection or anywhere with competing flows in traffic, you will always see traffic lights.

The concept is simple:

Traffic lights alternate the right of way accorded to road users by displaying lights of a standard color (red, yellow/amber, and green) following a universal color code (and a precise sequence to enable comprehension by those who are color blind).

Illumination of the green light allows traffic to proceed in the direction denoted,

Illumination of the yellow light denoting, if safe to do so, prepare to stop short of the intersection, and

Illumination of the red signal prohibits any traffic from proceeding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light

When it comes to designing software experiences this days, there is sometimes the need to display statuses against a record, usually coming in the form of a contrasting colour, self-explanatory icons, or even accompanied by text to better explain the status of the record.

Rather than re-inventing the wheel each time, why not look to the excellent design of traffic lights as a guiding principle?

Design Templates for Windows 8 Apps

Having recently collaborated with Microsoft in accelerating Windows 8 App development, I’ve came up with these design templates to serve as reference in designing Windows 8 Apps, providing more clarity in how to convert a conceptualised design from a Photoshop file into a full-fledged Windows 8 Apps with the use of Blend for Visual Studio.

Download link and more information on these design templates after the break.

A Rough Guide to Making Feature Decisions

I like relating product features into…food. Think about your product as a restaurant, and the dishes you’re offering as your features. To add a new dish to the restaurant menu, you might even need to consider everything from what dishes to sell, the name of the dish, the recipe of each dishes, how to present the dish, what cutlery to provide along with that dish, how it will be displayed in the menu and more.

Tricky, which sounds exactly like how tricky feature decisions are in product development.

During the past few months, work has been piling up and with deadlines looming and project milestones in the horizon, it’s been a challenging period, forcing everyone around me to work not only faster, but smarter.

It has also pushing everyone into making more snap decisions, which are basically decisions that are done swiftly without too much careful thought, mostly based on experience or intuition. There are many that say that snap decisions aren’t such a good idea, but I’ve found them to be very effective at times, if practiced correctly.

But there are also cases where we’ll be stuck in endless debates on what should be built, how should things work, and it all gets trickier when differing opinions cannot be aligned.

RIA Blog

On the design of user experiences for RIA & enterprise products