For eight years, I’ve been excited and happy to come to the office every day, continually challenged by my work. While my job role has evolved significantly over the years, I’ve enjoyed every moment: conducting usability research, collaborating with the leaders in the world of design, consulting with clients, teaching courses, developing new product lines, and most recently, managing the day to day operations of the company.

I’m extremely grateful for the support I’ve received from everyone at UIE. I would like to thank all of my co-workers for making UIE such a fun and exciting place to work. I would especially like to thank Jared Spool for giving me the opportunity to learn from his brilliance for nearly a decade. Jared: you’ve been a wonderful mentor and friend.

I expect to collaborate with the great folks at UIE in the not-too-distant future. I have full confidence that User Interface Engineering will continue to be a leader in the field for years to come.

All the time, I hear from clients working to build products and sites that reshape the market, hoping to duplicate Flickr’s success. But how can these design teams best go about developing innovative designs? Is it just luck when sites such as Flickr become successful?

If you’re challenged with creating innovative designs, I highly suggest you check out Scott Berkun’s writings on the subject. Scott is the author of the new book, The Myths of Innovation, and an expert when it comes to the history of innovation.

UIE’s Ashley McKee recently posted about a great interview Guy Kawasaki conducted with Scott Berkun, author of the new book, The Myths of Innovation, where Scott discusses how innovations happen and some of the biggest challenges designers face when trying to build innovative products. You’ll also want to check out Digital Web’s interview with Scott.

Why do these headlines suck so much? Fear. Fear of saying too much. Fear of saying something clever that someone might think is stupid. Fear of saying something revealing that might turn someone off. The headlines try desperately not to exclude anyone. In doing so, they succeed at boring everyone.

The “Hey” phenomenon is rampant in the corporate world. Branding is nothing more than a company’s personal ad, and companies are as bad at it as singles. Gap (NYSE:GPS), for example, is the “Hey” of fashion, thus its recent woes. And Ford Motor Co. (NYSE:F) –who, exactly, does it want to date? Brands with enough scale think they can get away with being generically likable. And some can, at least for a little while.

Dan and Chip touch upon a common mistake we’ve observed in our research: When design teams focus on satisfying the needs of everyone, they often fail to entice the people who actually matter, the target audience. Time and time again, we’ve found that the most successful teams focus on their specific users’ needs and create messages targeted just to them.

Would you like to join us? We are holding User Interface 11 from October 8 – October 12, 2006. We are still currently looking for volunteers who are available to assist us throughout the full five days of the conference. Volunteers will be asked to arrive in the afternoon on Sunday, October 8th and stay until the end of the conference.

Throughout the main four days of the conference, volunteers will be assigned to full-day seminars and short talks to assist conference speakers with their needs. Volunteers are responsible for paying for all travel and hotel accommodations but we will provide breakfast and lunch Monday through Thursday of the conference.

If you’re interested in volunteering, or if you have any questions, please send your replies directly to uiconf@uie.com. I’ll give priority to full-time students and those of you available to help out for the full conference, from Sunday, October 8th through Thursday, October 12th.

Last year, I completed the 90-mile ride in 9 hours. (I’ve been telling everyone the ride is actually 94 miles since I measured the distance last year!) The ride took me awhile — but I’m blaming my slow pace on the 50-degree weather, rain, and winds! This year, my goal is to complete the ride in 7 1/2 hours.

I started training for this year’s ride in January, working to get in shape for the big day. Now that it’s finally getting warmer in Massachusetts, I’ve started biking outside to prepare for the ride.

I’m writing to ask for help to reach my fundraising goal of $1,250. All donations will go to the Best Buddies organization. Any contribution you can spare will go a long way to my achieving this goal. Plus, Jared Spool and User Interface Engineering have graciously offered to match all of my contributions up to $1,000. Thanks guys!

You can make a donation for my bike ride here. Thanks in advance!

Jared Spool and I will be your hosts. Jared and I are in Atlanta for the kick-off of our UIE Roadshow 2006. We want to take this opportunity to meet and chat with others in our field.

The happy hour takes place from 5:00-6:00 pm at Django Gypsy Kitchen & Saloon in downtown Atlanta. Django is located at 495 Peachtree Street, Atlanta, GA 30308. Please come, network, and meet your local colleagues. RSVP by emailing events@uie.com.

Every time I give a course, I learn a tremendous amount about the problems that designers face. One of the big themes of the day was how difficult it is for organizations to manage the dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of people contributing content and creating design elements on their sites.

Some of the questions attendees asked:

• How can they get everyone contributing to the design on the same page?
• How can they guarantee that all of the designers produce successful results?
• Should they stick with their current templates or style guides?

Lately, one promising strategy we’ve shared with design teams is the creation of a Design Pattern Library. A design pattern describes a specific design problem that an organization has dealt with, such as presenting a login screen. The design pattern consists of a pattern name, a description of the design problem, the design solution, and the designer’s rationale behind that solution. (For more details about how to create a pattern, Jared recently wrote an article about the different components of a design pattern.)

We’ve really started to see design patterns take off within organizations. We’ve worked with several design teams that are now focused on building their own design pattern libraries. Even more exciting is that organizations have started to share their pattern libraries with the design community. For example, just this month, Yahoo published the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library.

We don’t advocate that design teams blindly follow the patterns outlined in Yahoo’s library. After all, your sites have their own unique goals and users. However, Yahoo’s design pattern library is a great model for organizations to review before getting started on creating their own internal libraries. While building a design pattern library takes a lot of time and energy, we’re definitely seeing organizations reap the benefits from their efforts.

When I set out to design a website, I do it backwards. I start with the design of the smallest, deepest element: the story page or search results. Then I work backwards to design their containers: section pages, indexes. Then, lastly, I work on the home page.

Derek’s approach to site design is consistent with what we’ve seen work most effectively. All too often, clients tell us they spend the majority of their time focusing on the design of the home page when we’ve found that it’s actually the least important page on the site. As Jared mentioned in his post, Is Home Page Design Relevant Anymore?, the home page serves only two purposes for users: it delivers the content, or it provides strong scent to get users to the content page they want.

We’ve seen that the most successful design teams focus on designing the content pages first, ensuring they have all the information that users need on those pages. They understand that the content page is the most important page to users for a very simple reason: this is where users find the information they’ve been seeking.

Does your team spend a large amount of time and resources focused on the homepage? Which page gets the highest priority with your team?

I fly into Portland on the 15th and leave on the 17th. I’d love some recommendations for what to do while there. Also, if anyone would be interested in meeting up for a drink, just pop a note. (You can use this form.)

Advertising is all about disruption. TV ads disrupt users from the content. Billboard signs can disrupt people from focusing on driving. Online ads function similarly — they disrupt users from the content they’re looking for.

That’s why it’s always a surprise when I encounter online advertisements that actually work effectively. This happened to me today on Rotten Tomatoes, a site where users can find a summary of the movie reviews from top film critics.

When users arrive, Rotten Tomatoes often disrupts them with ads even before they’ve had a chance to enter the site. When I visited today, I was exposed to an ad for the popular movie, Grizzly Man.

The ad disrupted me from looking for the content I came for — the reviews for George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck (a movie I really want to see.) But I wasn’t annoyed or frustrated. The ad supplied me with information I am actually interested in: Grizzly Man is showing on the Discovery Channel tomorrow night. I now have my TiVo all set up to record the movie.

We often remind our clients that users don’t want to be disrupted from their tasks. But disruption can actually work sometimes. Have you seen any effective online ads recently? How did the site get you to pay attention to the ad? Was the disruption acceptable?

The Million Dollar Homepage is an innovative site created by college student Alex Tew to help raise money for his college education. Alex’s business model involved selling the one million pixels displayed on the home page for $1 per pixel. The business experiment turned out to be a huge success — Alex sold all of the ad space.

In his post, Seth is impressed with Alex Tew’s strategy but is bewildered by all of the sites attempting to duplicate his success:

When I see the 10,000 copycats out there, all I can do is sigh. Why do they believe this is a new trend? Why do they think it’s going to become an important part of the marketing mix, and are they really so naive to believe that they, and they alone, will earn even more than Alex did?

I agree. I have serious doubts any of the sites trying to duplicate the concept will be successful. The Million Dollar Homepage was a novel advertising campaign that generated attention for many of the site’s initial advertisers because people wanted to see who was willing to participate in this experiment. But I find it hard to believe the site generates much value for advertisers now that all of the pixels have been sold.

The concept fails as a marketing strategy for a few reasons. Online branding is not just about exposing potential customers to the organization’s logo. We’ve seen in our research studies that indirect messaging such as logos rarely works effectively unless users are repeatedly exposed to them. Plus, the Million Dollar Homepage is so overloaded with images and impressions, it’s unlikely users will pay attention to one particular logo.

Successful online branding also involves a user forming an emotional association (such as a feeling of excitement or happiness) about an organization or product. In the case of the Million Dollar Homepage, customers are exposed to a page of cluttered advertisements. There isn’t a real relationship or emotional association being built.

Finally, advertisements tend to work best when they are in some way related to the task users are trying to accomplish when they visit a site. Without understanding the users’ context when they arrive at the Million Dollar Homepage, is any ad on the page guaranteed to resonate with them? I don’t think so.

While the Million Dollar Homepage is an innovative idea that paid off for the site’s creator, it really hasn’t paved the way for a new approach to successful advertising.

In a recent study described in the scientific journal Nature, Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa describes her research examining how long it takes users to form impressions about the visual aesthetics of a web site. From the Nature article:

Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.

(To get an idea of how long 50 milliseconds really is, take a look at an experiment comparing Bank of America’s home page for 50 milliseconds versus 500 milliseconds.)

All of our research examining users’ snap judgments is consistent with Dr. Lindgaard’s findings. We’ve seen in testing that users make important judgments very quickly when they arrive at a web page. That’s one of the reasons we use 5-second tests as our primary technique for evaluating users’ first impressions.

While I agree that users make very quick judgments about a site’s visual appeal, I disagree somewhat with the implications suggested by the study’s researchers:

Unless the first impression is favourable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors,” Lindgaard warns.

From what I can tell, the researchers didn’t find any actual evidence that users will leave a site after 50 milliseconds if they find a site visually unappealing. The problem with Lindgaard’s conclusions is that the research didn’t study how users behave when they’re trying to accomplish their tasks.

For example, CraigsList is a site that has tested very well with our users. Users loved the site. Why? Not because the site was visually appealing. CraigsList succeeded because the content surpassed their users’ expectations. The site makes its users happy despite what some might consider poor aesthetics. And none of the users left the site because of a “bad design.”

In all of our research studying user behavior, we see that visual aesthetics play a role in users’ judgments — but they take a backseat to the site’s content.

1. 5-Second Tests: Measuring Your Site’s Content Pages
How can design teams be confident their content pages are understandable to users? How does a team ensure they’ve designed content pages that communicate the essential information effectively? A simple usability testing technique can help design teams quickly measure how a content page performs with users. We call it the 5-Second Test.

2. What Makes a Design Seem ‘Intuitive’?
An intuitive interface doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when one of two specific conditions are met. In this article, Jared describes the critical relationship between current knowledge (what the user knows when they encounter the design) and target knowledge (what the user needs to know to accomplish their goal), showing the two conditions that lead to an interface users will perceive as intuitive.

3. Testing Web Sites with Eye-Tracking
Thanks to some usability studies we conducted using an eye-tracking system, we now have real evidence of where users actually look when they view a web page.

4. The KJ-Technique: A Group Process for Establishing Priorities
UIE’s researchers have one favorite technique for helping designers collaborate better with each other: The KJ-Method. UIE routinely uses the KJ-Method to help teams find patterns in large amounts of unorganized data. It quickly helps groups establish design priorities and reach consensus.

5. Seven Common Usability Testing Mistakes
As we work with teams all over the globe, there are mistakes that we see frequently. These mistakes are very easy to prevent — if only the team members realized they were making them. Here are seven of the most common mistakes.

I’ll admit I’ve never eaten at the Century House before. But now that I’ve seen how they choose to describe their food, I’m not all that eager to try out the restaurant anytime soon. Even when I visited the Century House web site, the designers chose to display the ‘Unexcelled Food’ description prominently on the home page.

If the designers of the Century House’s site had tested the copy, would users have found the description persuasive? So far, I’ve asked more than a dozen people what their impressions are and many assumed unexcelled was a negative term meaning that the restaurant’s food was poor or ‘not excelling’. Actually, the term has a very positive meaning: not capable of being improved on.

While the copywriters intended to persuade users to dine at the Century House, the words didn’t seem all that persuasive to the people I surveyed. This is why it’s so important for design teams to test out the effectiveness of the site’s copy with their users. By testing your own site, it really brings home the huge importance of words on the web.

Yahoo’s frustration with focus groups isn’t that surprising. At UIE, we hardly ever use focus groups because they just don’t work very well at uncovering user needs. The biggest problem: what users say in a focus group rarely matches what they do in a real-life setting. Users’ opinions about a site or product are very rarely consistent with how they behave when they actually interact with it.

We still find that usability testing is the best way to gather input from users. Nothing replaces the power of observing users interact with a site.

Since my first posting, many readers have asked whether they can use the 5-second test to evaluate their home page designs. While the technique is great way to get a glimpse into what happens during the first moments a user sees a page, it hasn’t given us valuable results when we’ve looked at home pages.

We’ve found that a 5-second test works best when we use it on content pages designed with a single primary purpose. However, a site’s home page typically serves the needs of several audiences, each with their own set of tasks. As a result, each of these different users see different things on the page, depending on their context and immediate goals. We’ve found that other techniques, such as traditional usability tests and inherent value tests do a better job of measuring the effectiveness of the home page.

In case you missed it, a few months back, I wrote an article about the 5-second test methodology, outlining how we set up these types of tests and when they are most effective.

As we’ve tested sites to see what strategies designs use to entice users with content, we weren’t surprised that the sites frequently feature advertisements and promotions for important content on the home page. The rationale for this design choice is clear. For users, the home page is the entry point for the site, so it makes sense to include content to entice them right away.

Users encounter featured content on the home page all the time. For example, users who visit Citizens Bank’s site, see an advertisement for home equity credit prominently on their home page. This one advertisement alone takes up approximately 50% of the real estate on the page.

Click to see Citizens Bank home page

Users who visit Merrill Lynch’s site see an advertisement for the company’s new Business Investor Account.

Click to see Merrill Lynch home page

One of the most surprising findings from our research is that users very rarely click on featured content on the home page. Why? Because when we watch users look for content on sites, they’re on a specific mission. Many of the site’s users might actually be interested in the accounts and credit lines available at Citizens Bank or Merrill Lynch, but they aren’t interested in that information — or looking for it — until after they’ve accomplished what they came to the site to do.

This is where the concept of seducible moments play a role. By observing users in usability tests, we’ve seen that there is a specific moment where designers have the best chance of enticing a user to pay attention to a promotion or advertisement. These moments typically come after the user has completed their task on the site. Jared wrote an excellent article about seducible moments, looking in detail at how Sears and Dell tackled the problem of enticing users to their featured content.

How have you had to deal with enticing your users with your important content? Have you taken advantage of seducible moments? We would like to hear what strategies you’ve tried and how they’ve worked for you.

Malcolm’s argument is consistent with what we’ve often believed may be a weakness of traditional usability tests: we may not be accurately uncovering the users’ first impressions of the content. In most tests, users give us their feedback only after completing a task on the site, once they’ve had some time to consciously process their impressions. But is this really how users make their first judgment of a web site in a real-life setting? According to Blink’s argument, probably not.

To more accurately assess users’ first impressions of designs, we’ve developed what we call the 5-Second Test. The main purpose of this variant of traditional usability testing is to assess a user’s Blink response to a site’s design and content.

This technique has helped us to collect valuable feedback from users in a very short amount of time. A few months back, I wrote an article about the 5-second test methodology, outlining how we set up these types of tests.

Have you come up with any techniques to measure the first impressions of users? How have they worked for you?

[Editors Update: Esteban, our friend from Factor Humano in Argentina reminds us that a Spanish version of Christine's article is available.]

At the conference, our bookseller brought all of the latest books on usability, product development, web design, development techniques, and user interface design. The most popular books were:

Call to Action: Secret Formulas Improve Online Results
Our good friends and User Interface 10 Conference speakers, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, have written an excellent book describing Persuasion Architecture, their methodology for convincing users to take action and help meet site’s business objectives.

Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design
The always brilliant and witty Eric Meyer provides a practical, hands-on book guiding readers through several CSS projects that teach designers about each of the different aspects of CSS.

Ambient Findability
Peter Morville has written a wonderful new book that offers a great discussion of how we find things, whether in the real world or online.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi gave a wonderfully received spotlight plenary at UI10, outlining the main factors that contribute to a flow experience. In this seminar book, Mihaly introduces the concept of flow, describing the optimal psychological state associated with high levels of satisfaction and fulfillment.

The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightening for the Web
We’ve been huge fans of the CSS Zen Garden site, so it comes as no surprise that we love Dave Shea’s and Molly Holzschlag’s book. It’s a great way to see the power of CSS and how you can solve a myriad of complex problems with straightforward techniques.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
In his bestselling book, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that there’s a key point where products, messages, and behaviors can spread just like viruses: the tipping point. At UIE, this book has provided us with huge insights into how word-of-mouth marketing works.

We have all of these great resources on our bookshelves at UIE. I highly recommend you check them out.

Would you like to join us? I’m still currently looking for volunteers who are available to assist us throughout the full five days of the conference. You will be asked to arrive at the conference in the afternoon on Sunday, October 9th to help us set up for conference check-in and the Welcome Reception.

Throughout the main four days of the conference, volunteers will be assigned to full-day seminars and short talks to assist conference speakers with their needs. In addition, you will have at least one free day to attend conference sessions (probably more) for free. We’ll make every effort to accommodate your preference for which sessions you’d like to attend.

You will be responsible for paying for all travel and hotel accommodations. But we’ll provide breakfast and lunch Monday through Thursday of the conference.

If you’re interested in volunteering, or if you have any questions, please send your replies directly to uiconf@uie.com. I’ll give priority to full-time students and those of you available to help out for the full conference, from Sunday, October 9th through Thursday, October 13th.

What is a 7-11 Milk Experiment? Here’s the scenario: Imagine I had a way to identify when someone has run out of milk. I pick them up in my car and drive them to the nearest 7-11. And just to make sure everything goes well, I give them the money to buy milk. How likely is it that that store can sell milk in this scenario? When I’ve asked people this question, almost all respond that it’s close to 100%. If the store does not end up selling to the user, there’s clearly something wrong with their experience on the site.

In our research, we mirror this type of experiment online. We find people who need products, bring them to sites that have the products they want, and give them money to buy the products. What did we find?

In our latest study, users only purchased 30% of the time! So, what was happening here? We found that on most of the sites, users just couldn’t find what they were looking for and that the site’s organization was to blame.

From watching users shop, we’ve seen that they use a progressive process. Users move from one stage to the next, as they try to purchase a product. One of the biggest priorities in our current research agenda is to identify where in the purchase process users fail, such as the Home Page, the Product Lists pages, or the Target Content pages. By understanding how these different stages and types of web pages work, we hope to learn a lot more about building usable sites.

The designers of UNI.edu have put considerable time and effort into sharing the experiences of people associated with the university. The site has more than 40 detailed profiles of students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

There’s a huge amount of information users can glean from these profiles. For example, since visiting the web site, I’ve already asked three friends, “Did you know Entertainment Tonight’s co-host, Mark Steines, attended the University of Northern Iowa?” With my addiction to t.v. shows and movies, I found the tidbits about Mark really interesting.

Why did the designers of UNI’s site invest so much energy in these profiles? One reason is that they knew users really needed this type of content to make a decision about where to attend college. Before deciding whether UNI is the school for them, prospective students visited the web site with one main goal – to see what other students had experienced.

At UIE, we coined the term “inukshuk” to describe the type of content in these UNI profiles. The term comes from the Inukshuk stone figures created by Inuit eskimos as guide markers. These figures signified to other hunters that others has already passed through and experienced their same journey. The main purpose of the inukshuk was to provide reassurance and empathy to others.

In our research, we’ve seen that, just like the Inuit hunters, users on the web want reassurance that others have shared their experience. In the case of UNI, the inukshuk content was very effective at offering the content users needed to make a decision about whether to attend the university.

You can find inukshuk content on many sites. It’s seen in web site discussion boards and testimonials, where users want to be informed through other users’ experiences. We’ve seen that inukshuk content is an invaluable way to share information with users.

I’m not really surprised by Dan’s experience. Clients come to us all the time wanting to know if they can build them without doing any research.

Lately, in the hope of better answering our clients questions about personas, we’ve been looking closer at how development teams use personas and how they incorporate them into their design process.

One of the biggest surprises from our research is how each development team leverages personas in a slightly different way. While most of the teams were aware of the Cooper technique for developing and refining personas, very few adhered to Cooper’s rigorous process for building personas from the user data. It wasn’t that the teams didn’t want to use Cooper’s approach. In most cases, they just didn’t have enough information about how Cooper actually builds the personas. The detailed process was a mystery to them.

Most of the teams we investigated did conduct up-front research to collect information about their users. Some teams created fictitious personas based on interview and focus group data, while others based their personas on actual people they had interviewed. We also found that, when teams use personas well, every member of the team really does seem to be on the same page about who the users are and what design will work best for them.

While our research is still underway, we’ve been so happy with our preliminary findings that we’re going to continue to take a closer look at what’s really happening when a team uses personas. We’d really like to take some of the mystery out of persona development.

Are you using personas in your development process? Are your personas based on user research? What benefits are you seeing?

That’s why, in the past few months at UIE, we’ve been really intrigued by the work that Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg have been doing with Persuasion Architecture. The Eisenbergs have created a promising process that helps design teams incorporate persuasive elements into their site’s design. We’ve seen it’s a great way to map your sales process to your visitor’s purchasing process.

Bryan recently wrote a fantastic article describing some of the key factors that affect a user’s persuasive momentum. He gives a concise summary of the four factors (Knowledge, Need, Risk, and Consensus) that determine how complex your organization’s persuasive process needs to be.

More and more lately, we’ve recommended our clients focus on Persuasion Architecture to help convert their prospective users into paying customers. The Eisenberg’s process seems to be a great way to help boost your site’s conversions, whether your objective is sales, lead generation, or disseminating content.

As you can probably tell, we are big fans of Bryan and Jeffrey’s work. We think their book, Call to Action, is an excellent resource for folks looking for an introduction to Persuasion Architecture. You can also see Jeffrey and Bryan present here.

But there still isn’t just one right way to conduct a usability test. Every usability team has their own unique testing method. They have their own techniques for creating tasks, recruiting users, facilitating the tests, and disseminating test results.

Over the past several years, we’ve been excited by Rolf Molich’s research at Dialog Design. Since 1998, Rolf’s conducted four Comparative Usability Evaluation (CUE) research studies to investigate the many different usability methods employed by teams.

The CUE studies are the first of their kind. Usability practitioners from all over the world are asked to evaluate the same interface, using their standard practices. Rolf compares the different results of the study participants, looking to see which practices are most effective at discovering and reporting usability practices.

The most famous study, CUE-2, had nine teams conduct usability tests of Microsoft’s Hotmail interface. Last year, CUE-4 had 18 testers (using both expert inspections and usability testing) looking at iHotelier’s Flash-based hotel reservation system.

Through the CUE studies, Rolf Molich has collected the methods, reports, and results of dozens of usability teams, pulling the best practices. At UIE, we’ve found this type of research to be very informative. We learn so much when we compare our own methods against our colleagues and peers.

This October, members of UIE’s usability team are looking forward to participating in Rolf’s CUE study at our User Interface 10 Conference. I expect we’ll learn a great deal comparing our own methods to our colleagues in the field.

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.