Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

and open to changing or abandoning it. Tests allow you to gather hard, empirical evidence,
which can be used to defend a design decision or can help you see early enough that
you’ve got to change your plan. You’ve got to think of the interactive prototypes you’re
building as the means for testing a hypothesis, not for proving it, and as with all scientific
experiments, you have to be careful not to introduce any experimenter bias. The
information you collect will help you confirm or revise your understanding of your user
personas, will validate or disprove assumptions you’ve made about how well your design
is crafted, and will almost always inspire some good new ideas. You should think of
yourself as an anthropologist going out in the field to observe.
My determination to make sure the products I work on are sensitive to users is always
fueled by observing people “in the wild” using their mobile devices. I’m continually
astonished by the lengths to which people are willing to go to read minuscule type or work
their way through a clunky interface. If you catch me in the subway looking over your
shoulder at your phone, I’m probably watching how you navigate rather than trying to
follow along with the story. I encourage you to always be doing these “field studies.” They
have been a great source of insight for me, usually showing me what not to do but also
helping me think of features I can offer and situations I should try to replicate in user tests.
For apps for mobile devices, if users have told me they are always on the device on
the subway, I’ve conducted tests with subjects standing to see if I can get them to use a
device one-handed, because people often have to stand on the subway and hold onto a
strap or pole while riding. To test the Times’ free article-counter feature, I might give users
thirty minutes to read several articles and then ask them to tell me about the day’s news.
This would be a way to simulate their normal reading scenario. It’s all about getting as
close as possible to actual circumstances, both mentally and physically, for more reliable
results. A user tapping a stationary phone on a table or clicking with a mouse when she is
accustomed to a trackpad does not represent actual conditions well enough.