John McRee – UXD

Recently I’ve been designing an application for teenagers who do page layout in school, most of which are girls.  It’s  creative tool and our visual designer skinned it with a very “pro-app” look and feel by creating high contrast between the working area and the GUI.  This meant making the GUI quite dark, and we weren’t sure if this would resonate with teenage girls.

A focus group is a great way to do a reality check after you have some visual direction for your site or application.  It took very little effort to “buy” their time with a pizza and some Starbucks.  And in three one-hour sessions what we heard was reliably repetitive, challenged our assumptions, and informed/confirmed our design.

I know that Focus Groups get a bit of a bad rap these days, and for good reason.  If you ever want to see group think in action, run a focus group.  For any of you who missed out on this fun sociological phenomenon, group think is essentially created by some loud voices speaking for the group and everyone else nodding and parroting what the loud ones say.  This isn’t good when you are trying to measure usability of interaction and task flow, but this is fantastic when trying to find out more about the likability of a product.  The loud ones are going to be loud at home, at work, in school, and online.  The loud ones are the trend setters.

User research is an essential component for designing software when tasked with designing a product that will be used by someone who is very different from the design (15 year old girls, 70 year old retirees, long-haul truckers, etc…). But finding time and budget for research is a tough sale.

Most of the current methods that are offered in the lecture circuit or in books on Amazon set aside a period of time in the beginning of a project dedicated to research and persona development. Some methods have offered that complete personas can be developed in as little as 30 days! While one month for detailed and well-researched (read USEFUL) personas is, I agree, more or less the minimum for consumer level products, I have found very very few companies that are willing to swallow the pill and let a contractor have a month for this type of activity regardless of its importance or value.

One of my colleagues came up with a good analogy for the company who agrees to an endeavor. They are a flying unicorn. You see, unicorns are pretty rare and very elusive. But flying unicorns… Well you don’t see many of those around, do you?

Since flying unicorns are extremely rare and user research and other UCD methods are necessary to deliver on target, a new strategy is needed to get the job done. We can’t expect the client to always agree for paying for UCD and research outright, so we need to “bake” them into the project plan and use some very fast and dirty (Guerilla) methods to accomplish our goals as designers.

I’ll be talking about some of these approaches in the weeks to come. Stay tuned.