How can design teams gather data from users when their target audience is difficult to access?

We often recommend that our clients test surrogate users when the design’s actual users are unavailable. For example, we were recently tasked with testing a sophisticated medical application designed primarily for surgeons. Because the surgeons’ time was too valuable to be pulled away for hours of usability tests, we found it nearly impossible to recruit them for testing.

To combat this problem, we chose surrogate users for the usability tests — medical students. While these students were not the target audience for the application, they helped us find some some of the biggest problems with the application’s functionality early on in our testing.

While it’s ideal for design teams to test users who directly match the target audience, we use surrogates any time our primary users are inaccessible. We try and recruit users with profiles as similar as possible to that of our target audience. In any instance where the surrogate medical students were missing the necessary domain knowledge to complete a task, we prompted them with the information any surgeon would possess. This allows us to provide the surrogates with the same knowledge as the target users.

By testing medical students, we found several major usability problems not related to domain expertise, and didn’t eat up any of the surgeons’ time.

While there is a clear benefit to using surrogates, we’re careful not to base all of our design decisions on this testing. We test with surrogates early on in the development process, understanding that the user behavior may not completely reflect the behavior of the actual target users. When we make major design decisions about an interface, we’re still careful to test the target users later on in the development process, adding what we learn to the information we gathered from the surrogates.

While surrogate testing is less effective than testing target users, getting some information early is much better than waiting to test the target users late in the development process.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2005 at 11:05 am and is filed under Usability Toolbox, Users . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.