Don’t Fear the Big Red X
Good products require good user testing. Good user testing means running experiments designed to test good hypotheses and assumptions. Good hypotheses and assumptions are falsifiable: you can design experiments to show whether they’re true or false.
This means being prepared to draw big red Xs beside your cherished ideas.
When a City of Toronto resident requests a new traffic signal, City engineers use collision and traffic data to assess the benefits, drawbacks, costs, and logistics of installing that signal. This process is called a signal warrant. (There are also all-way stop sign warrants, pedestrian signal warrants, etc.)
Sometimes, the traffic data they need hasn’t been gathered yet, and the engineers need to request it! In our early user tests, our interface framed this data request as part of the warrant process: “Request Data for a Warrant”.
This framing made sense to us, but it confused our users: they understood the warrant not as a process, but as a report created once you have all the data. They also sometimes view and request data outside the warrant process, and couldn’t see how this interface would accommodate that.
Some key takeaways here:
- test early, test often: by putting lo-fi prototypes in front of users quickly, we gained an important product insight in weeks instead of months.
- validate the solution: knowing exactly what problem to solve doesn’t tell you which solution will best address it.
