A sign your User Experience needs a reality check
Posted on | March 11, 2009
How can it be that a sign-writer, who arranges letters day in day out, can make a spelling mistake?
A mere series of stickers applied to a board, but somewhere along the line, the very purpose of the sign, the word itself became an abstract series of tasks within a task.
Happily beavering away up there in the cherry-picker, the sign-writer has lost sight of the big picture only two letters in … and walked away from the finished task unaware it has totally missed the target – To be read by people.
This happens every day when business and design teams become too close to their product.
The end user experience can and often is inadvertantly deprioritised when you are totally immersed in the myriad details of build and delivery. User research with identified customers provides the vital ‘reality checking’ of a product, helping the designers see the product through the fresh eyes of its future users.
We’ve got spell-check to keep us literate, but before we deliver our message, it pays to test the product with real customers to ensure we really are speaking their language.
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July 20th, 2009 @ 9:13 am
[...] assumptions about their audience, project their own goals and needs onto the project and become too close to their products, losing sight of the big picture. Usability testing with the target market at an early stage would have identified signup and [...]
May 24th, 2010 @ 9:33 am
[...] a recent website usability project came from the opposite angle. My client had accepted how deeply immersed in the technical nature of their product and their way of communicating it was out of whack with terms their target market would relate [...]