get into our users’ lives 20Feb06

In his latest article at adaptivepath.com Peter Merholz suggests usability experts to do more field research:

"Increasingly, we find that our projects warrant getting out of our office and into our users’ lives. The generic term for this practice is “field research,” and that can mean talking to people in their homes, observing work practices in an office, or conducting guerrilla research in a public place like a shopping mall.
Such deep work can lead to insights you simply won’t get any other way. I led a project for a well-known consumer brand that wanted to develop a Web application to help people remember important occasions. Such projects often involve developing a prototype and inviting typical users in to see if they can use it. Even though we had a set of well-defined requirements, we decided to visit 12 people in their homes to understand the context in which such a tool would be used. Our observations opened our eyes to the messy complexity of how people manage this information. One woman had dates and addresses spread across a week-at-a-glance planner, a church-published mailing list, a Palm, a Psion-like device, and, most impressively, an Access database she developed for her wedding. This led to a realization that the basic product concept was flawed and would likely see little uptake, but it also revealed new opportunities around craft and creativity that had been rejected at an earlier stage."

Internetverweis

Get Out of Your Lab, and Into Their Lives