Weeknote: Early-stage testing makes us happy
Weeknote #5
This week’s weeknote is brief. And we decided to be purely subjective.
[The highlight was] the feeling of being able to do user testing right away. And, for the first time, without having to use up a lot of time explaining to clients and stakeholders.
We were able to do testing during a soft launch; our clients were open-minded about waiting for the results after that test. And, it was all a very professional process.
The output also was very different. — B
Pwedeng basahin ang post na ‘to sa Tagalog-Taglish dito.
Where this is coming from is B and I come from years of corporate and agency work, where it was repeatedly a struggle to convince managers and clients (the ones in control of the budget), to allow us to do multiple rounds of testing.
Our workaround, then, was to do guerilla testing funded by…ourselves. Walk into coffee shops and cafeterias, have people use the prototypes; or pay for small gift certificates and student recruiters from our own pockets.
Well, we struck gold with our clients this time, both of whom have spent many years each managing digital businesses (start-ups and product) here in Manila and in Silicon Valley, and both of them fully support iterative design. We couldn’t be luckier and you can really see the difference in the way you can evolve a design through testing.
And, because we’re not always so lucky, I’ll also share one of the most well-crafted posts I’ve seen on the value of UX Research.
What we know about work, we owe — not only to our formal education and our jobs, but also to the forward-thinking designers, developers, researchers,product managers and teams who choose to share their processes and lessons (for free) on Youtube, blogs, websites and MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses) tutorials. This is the spirit of designing in the open. Where design teams show their process and what they learn along the way. This is done to grow the knowledge base of the industry, and also to get feedback and dialogue going about the work.
(If you’re interested in reading more about the beauty of open design, you can read this.)
We share what we experience in these weeknotes. To respect our clients’ confidentiality, we won’t directly post details about them. Everything we share here are the opinions (and life lessons) of the writer.
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