Alertbox #6

Acting on User Research

Alertbox and hundreds of other agencies have studied and produced thousands of reports and from them have produced thousands of guidelines in an effort to help the designer of a website produce something the user can use. Now that we have all of these reports what do we do with them.

First Steps

We can use this research as a reality check. We can first speculate what a user wants and then find out if our speculations are correct. We can use the research that has been performed and implement it in our own sites but take it in small bites at a time. Make the general and basic issues concrete and build from there, and continue to use the research findings as a checklist.

Handling Disagreements

There are two main reason why people disagree with a research study. One, their research shows something different, or two, their personal opinions do not agree with the research. While it may be true that your case could be special, chances are that it's not your opinion could be false. Design isn't religion; you can be wrong without getting defensive about it. If you are positive that you are right, however, go ahead and conduct some experiments of your own. You could be one of the rare exceptions.

This Alertbox article was good to know because it goes off of what we have already discussed in class. It kind of brings up the point that we don't need to always re-invent the wheel. It is important to do prototyping, but if we already know some of the characteristics that the user will show then we can take that into effect now and save time and money from doing things that we can read in a book. We also need to be humble and admit that our way may not always be the best way.