Yesterday, I gave my Virtual Seminar on Building Robust Personas in 30 Days or Less. If you missed it, you can watch it on demand. The session went well, but we ran tight on time and I didn’t get to all the great questions. Brian and I were just talking and we’re planning a followup [...]

The always intriguing Christopher Fahey commented on yesterday’s post about Crappy Personas vs. Robust Personas: Personas provide a fabulous way for people who understand their audience/users to communicate their understanding to people who do not understand that audience in a rapid and meaningful way. They are also a great way for people who have different [...]

There’s been a lot of discussion lately on the Interwebs about how personas are a useless tool. 37Signals’ Jason Fried recently wrote: We don’t use personas. We use ourselves. I believe personas lead to a false sense of understanding at the deepest, most critical levels. Every product we build is a product we build for [...]

A while back, I wrote about a question our friend Cheryl had about the KJ technique. Recently, Cheryl got back to me about her company’s reaction: A few months back you kindly responded to my inquiry about facilitating a KJ Analysis session. The team did a great job and I was relieved as a couple [...]

In usability tests where we incorporate interview-based tasks, the participants interests are discovered, not assigned. Unlike traditional task design methods, the test facilitator and participant negotiate the tasks during the tests, instead of proceeding down a list of predefined tasks. There are many situations where this is the appropriate way to test a product.

UIEtips 9/27/07: The Power of Comics for Understanding User Needs As designs and product visions become more complex, there is an increasing need to find ways that effectively convey just how people will use the product and integrate it into their lives. Recently, more and more organizations and design teams have turned to comics to [...]

We’ve had some great comments on my post, Usability Tests with 30 Observers. Here are my responses.

This week, Christine Perfetti asks Jared Spool about one of UIE’s most valuable usability testing techniques, Inherent Value Tests. Inherent Value Testing gives the team important information about how well a web site communicates the inherent value the designers are putting into the site.

I’m very excited about our upcoming Virtual Seminar presented by my good friend, Larry Constantine. If your team is facing an aggressive deadline for your web site or product launch and you don’t have the time or resources to conduct in-depth user research, you’ll want to gather everyone around for Larry’s presentation on September 27th. [...]

Because there’s a large number of design agents and stake holders involved and often a small number of available tests to observe, we can find ourselves in a situation where we need to have many observers in one session. It’s not unusual to have 30 or more observers sitting in a single usability test. Here’s how we pull it off.