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On a discussion thread to which I subscribe, a friendly
debate about whether we prefer the term “Information Architect” or “User
Experience Architect” as a job title took an interesting—but by no means unrelated—turn
towards the subject of drinking wine. This prompted a post by IA Donna Maurer, who
offered one of her blog entries describing the detailed taxonomy of her wine
rack. In her explanation, she states that “I thought I should show just one
aspect of my obsession with organizing stuff. People always laugh at me when I
tell them about this. Not sure why – after all, I do organise messy content for
a living.”

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According to a pair of articles on BusinessWeek.com, the
social networking site Facebook.com attracted 11.5 million individual visitors
over the age of 35 in June, more than double the number a year before. The
growth of this segment is remarkable, given that the site was not open to all
until late September 2006, and the increasing “graying” of Facebook is
predicted to change the site’s character and content.

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“I’m sick of users,” announced Josh Bernoff in
a recent blog entry, leading one to initially believe that he has joined the
ranks of indifferent (or outright hostile) developers, clients, and other uninterested
parties reluctantly associated with producing applications and websites. However,
Bernoff’s distaste is semantic, not social. He argues that the term “user”
emphasizes technology over relationships and encourages a flattened and skewed
view of the people interacting with the products. He challenges the readers to “try,
just for a day, to stop using this word. You’ll be amazed at how differently
you think about the world.”

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Second
Story Interactive Studios, in its own words, “creates informative and
entertaining interactive experiences in the form of media-rich storytelling
presentations, online collections, interpretive installations, and
database-driven applications.” The company comprises a diverse team of creative artists,
writers, producers, animators and programmers who enjoy a work environment that
boasts both a screening room and a technology lab for experimentation,
prototyping and testing of their projects.

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The Pathfinder User Experience Design team has written and published a whitepaper that was recently distributed at the annual Software 500 Conference in Boston, MA. The paper will show you how to combine Agile and UXD practices to get higher acceptance, fewer support calls, and return customers as well as define four key places in an agile development process where you can improve project success by integrating UXD practices into the Agile software development cycle. These techniques include the use of personas, taskflows, rapid prototyping, and iterative testing, among others, depending on the stage of development.

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Even in waterfall-based design and development projects, formal usability testing at the time the system is being finalized is essentially “too much, too late”: a time-consuming, labor-intensive activity yielding results that are frequently unactionable for the current release. Several iterative assessment techniques, however, can be employed throughout any process, providing timely insight and direction. These techniques are readily adaptable to the Agile methodology, and, with some minor adaptations, can in fact be regarded as “agile” usability testing methods. Low-fidelity testing, using paper prototypes (or even hand sketches) can provide a quick benchmarking, and can be incorporated into a scrum meeting.

Why is usability testing important in the Agile environment?

A crucial component of the Agile methodology is the practice of obtaining customer feedback after every iteration and then making functional changes accordingly. Introducing usability assessments at key points in the process can ensure that the users’ requirements will also be recognized and accommodated within the development process, at a point when any potentially off-course decisions can be corrected and improvements implemented.

The nature of Agile development is to focus on individual features and although the project “epic” attempts to preserve the big picture for the product, this view is nevertheless focused on the functional and business requirements, rather than on the holistic user experience. Usability testing can document and validate issues that may only be the opinions of the team.

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Usability studies are experiencing a shift in geography. For some time now, there has been some consensus that a traditional, dedicated usability lab is an unnecessary expenditure for an individual organization. Of course, since we specialize in User Experience Design, including usability testing, it’s a moot point for us. But we’re not exempt from the cost factor, either.

The main driver for this movement is the availability of software such as Morae and Spectator. Even Mac users are getting into the game with a product called VisualMark. These products turn a couple of laptops into a portable usability lab at the fraction of the cost of a full, fixed installation.

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Too often, usability testing is judged to be a “nice-to-have,” but dispensable within the time and budget constraints of a full design and development project.

This activity is often incorrectly perceived as being solely a formalized study that is time and labor intensive, with the potential to threaten the timeline and swell the budget. This is especially the case with the increasing dominance of Agile development methodologies, in which usability testing is thought to be a hindrance to the rapid iterative process.

However, there are many methods to elicit user feedback, both during development and pre-release. Here are the pros and cons of a few.

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The growing partnership between user-centered design practices and the array of agile methodologies faces an impasse when it comes to usability testing. In a traditional waterfall approach, a formal usability assessment generally occurs close to release and is structured–and often perceived by clients–as a culminating Big Event. Consequently, the attempt to insert traditional usability testing events into the iterative agile process is viewed by developers as antithetical to their process.

Several interesting articles have been written that explore this topic. Uzanto’s Jonathan Boutelle takes the novel approach that usability testing should be taken out of the hands of specialists, whom he feels filters the user insights and often fails to communicate them to the design team. His strategy is to solicit "a constant drip drip drip of insights" by recruiting a small number of participants from Craigslist and having them assess the system remotely. This, he feels, allows the developers to experience the insights first hand.

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Leisa Reichelt has recently published a thought-provoking post on her site, disambiguity, titled "Yes, you should be using personas." She states that she’s "come to the opinion that personas are incredibly valuable, but not for the reasons many people think they are."

Instead of functioning as a tool to justify design, she argues, personas should serve as the vehicle to communicate the user centered process to stakeholders. By involving the members of the project team in the creation of personas, as well as involving them in user research and testing, they will gain first-hand experience with the design process. And that is, I think, more compelling than having the UXD team create beautifully formatted artifacts in isolation and then present them with a flourish (and extended explanation).

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