This is just a quick pointer to my latest UXmatters column, which is a follow-on to my article from September about the perils and pitfalls of testing your own designs.
In this follow-on, I revisited some of my more bombastic points about testing one’s own designs. Thanks to some excellent comments by several colleagues (and colleague-slash-wife), I modified and built upon my original recommendations and provide some modified guidelines. Here’s the summary guidelines. To understand the reasoning behind them, go read the whole article.
Guideline 1—When testing your own designs, don’t think of it as a test to pass or fail, think of it as part of your design process.
Guideline 1a—Test early, test as often as possible, and test lo-fi prototypes rather than making usability testing a make-or-break event in your design lifecycle.
Guideline 2—When testing your own designs, you should seek disconfirming evidence, but be alert for joys and delighters, too.
Guideline 3—When you’re trying to solve a design problem, usability testing serves design. It’s a tool. Use it to improve your design, not to justify your actions.
Comments about these guidelines? Email me via UsabilityBlog, or comment at UXmatters.
Testing Your Own Designs Redux ::? Paul Sherman via UXmatters
In general I try to be strategic, which usually means talking about “big” user experience and staying oriented on the business value of UX.
But every once in a while I just have to point to a particularly bad interaction, then cluck my tongue and wag my finger.
So it is with this time zone setting interaction from Typepad.
What a pain in the tuchas. I actually gave up trying to set my time zone because a) the list is so large and unmanageable and b) I couldn’t find Dallas or Houston, much less Austin. I understand that this service is meant to be used world-wide…but how hard would it have been to lead off the list with “US Eastern (GMT – something)”, “US Central” (GMT – something)” etc?
Oh, and if you go to your Typepad account settings page I challenge you to figure out which fields are required. Hint: you can’t. Because they don’t tell you until after you fail to fill one out. Nice.
(Note: It must be “beat up on Amazon day” here in Central Texas, because I just noticed that Russell Wilson over at Dexo Design just posted an article about Amazon’s “can’t sign in from home page” problem.)
After all these years, Amazon still hasn’t fixed that wonky “new customer” / “returning customer” interaction.
For those of us who tab their way through form fields, this one bites me in the butt every time. First I enter my email, then I tab to the password field. Then I enter it, tab to the commit button, and get whacked by the “Oops! You forgot to say you’re a returning customer!” gotcha.
Now I love Amazon like crazy, but this one is such an EASY fix. Why is it still around after all these years?
