A letter to Wes

28 Sep 2010 by celine

My friend asked me to share notes with him before he left to Ireland to work as an experiemental sound designer called : “A Semiotic Approach to the Design of Non-speech Sounds” and conduct user research at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University of Belfast,
Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland. He is a wonderful genius coder, musician and artist, he hasn’t had the chance to work in the ux field at all since this new offer. So I wrote this, and thought of sharing it here.

Hello Wes,

Let us lay down the 5 reasons why we want to test our products, ideas, designs.

1. User testing are a great way to challenge ideas, and to get the designer out of his/her head and

more into the actual world. (Observing how people are actually using the product and how to make it better for them)

2. Prototyping and testing facilitate innovation. Taking the results of each test and applying them to the design in small
iterations increases the quality of the product

3. When putting people at the center of the design process we tend to design something tailored to their needs or behavior

4. “We can only know it once we’ve test it”. In a design workshop or

office, we tend to debate of our ideas and ego trip on each other. Testing the ideas with
people that will probably use the product helps make the best decision.

5. User testing can also be made in the early stages of design as to help define the needs and goals people

really have, as well as an excellent way to isolate their behavior to be able to design for it. We can see this phase as an experimental anthropological observation of
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To measure the success of each design, it is important to lay down the
goals as they help identify the keys to a successful study.
There is a classic way to separate the goals from one another, in
order to focus on a group of them in a prolific way.

We identify 3 main types of Goals:

A) User goals

example: “i want to be able to get to the weather information easily”
“i want to let my friends know where i am” “i want to save images and
used them later” “i want to be able to find what i’m looking for”…

B) Business goals

example: ROI, leverage the community, get people to buy the
accessories, get more users, get more subscribers, monetize the
content, offer great services and leverage our traffic, sell the
app…

C) Brand goals

example: Reinforce our connection with our audience, communicate with
our audience, listen to our audience, bring a great experience, we are
pop, we are classic, we are a reference, we are corporate, we aspire
trust…

Documenting is key. Interviews, meetings, brainstorms, DOCUMENT them
and share with your team. Preferably on a platform where they can add
their points of views of the meetings too (there is no way you can
cover it all) Why document? Because it is a tangible proof and element
of reference for all the work (design) that you will be doing.

Now, understanding people’s behavior in order to translate them in
design. The closer you are to the truth, to their actual environment,
the closer you get to really grasp the reality of things. After many
user tests, we can still be in denial of basic understanding of the
other person. That is why the designer ought to be truthful and
invisible in this process.
Seeing this process as a documentary helps getting better results out
of the process.

For references:

1) /picking-the-right-tool-for-your-remote-user-testing/
2) /25-user-experience-videos-that-are-worth-your-time/
3) /gaming-the-web-using-the-structure-of-games-to-design-better-web-apps-dan-saffer/

Please ask me questions. I am not good at writing essays.
If I forgot to mention things, please ask me what you’d like to know,
or just bounce ideas at me. I am here and would love to help ya

Hope all is good with you
<3