I am reporting back about the series of usability testing we are doing for our baseline usability project. In Tuesday’s blog, I referenced the Microsoft encoder tool that we used for the first time in our usability session yesterday. Everything went well. The software/hardware combination worked as planned. I wish I could share the recorded session with you, but cannot due to privacy issues. If you are going to be doing some usability testing, I recommend this approach.
So far, we have completed 3 tests. In all cases, it was extremely helpful for me as a designer and developer to witness the user tests. I commented to my co-worker that the exercise has made the user real for me. When I develop, I usually picture “the” user using the interface, or the user base as a whole. Now I will develop for “Carlos” or “Mark” or “Jim”. Shortly after this discovery, I read an article by Don Norman about how he doesn’t like the generalization of calling our users users. Instead, he prefers calling them people.
Here is a quote from his article.
“If we are designing for people, why not call them that: people, a person, or perhaps humans. But no, we distance ourselves from the people for whom we design by giving them descriptive and somewhat degrading names, such as customer, consumer, or user. Customer – you know, someone who pays the bills. Consumer – one who consumes. User, or even worse, end user – the person who pushes the buttons, clicks the mouse, and keeps getting confused. “
I also recall an interesting book by Alan Cooper titled “The Inmates are Running the Asylum” where he discusses the concept of creating user personas. Cooper says,
“To create a product that must satisfy a broad audience of users, logic will tell you to make it as broad in functionality as possible to accommodate the most people. Logic is wrong. You will have far greater success by designing for one single person.”