August 20, 2006
Personas and user feedback
We already know a lot about our users, and we’ve created detailed personas. Do we need to do usability testing, too?
It’s very valuable to know as much as possible about your users when designing a user experience. Among the things you should know about are the environment in which the users work, the systems and tools they use, the most frequent and important tasks they do, their workflow, and their mental models of their tasks.
But even if you spend significant time understanding your users up front, you still won’t know for sure how they will react to an actual system you are designing. Even the most talented professionals sometimes make mistakes in requirements gathering and/or guess wrong when designing a user interface that’s supposed to be easy to learn, efficient and appealing for other people. Whether to do usability testing is really a question of how confident you want to be in your design before a development team puts time, energy and money into implementing it.
We have found that the most effective process includes not only understanding your end-users up front, but also iterating on early designs and prototypes based on direct user feedback from usability testing.
Filed under: Usability, Process_and_Strategy | Permalink
