Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

TESTING IN THE REAL WORLD
Data analytics and remote testing programs are making those kinds of testing cheaper and
easier to do all the time. But as I’ve said, most often the budget of both time and money
for testing is very limited, and it’s common that no formal testing will be prescribed for
you to do until a full prototype is created—if then. So I encourage you not to wait for
testing to be requested. I know in my career I’ve always had to go above and beyond what
the job description called for, and one thing that has meant is conducting usability tests of
my own, through any means possible, and I know the same is true for lots of UX
designers. When people ask me what I test with, the answer is whatever I can get my
hands on.
Testing a full working prototype before launch is always advised. Just think of the
debacle of the Obama administration’s launch of the HealthCare.gov site any time you’re
tempted to forgo the process. Nothing else will reveal problems in a product the way
giving users an actual working version does. As a UX designer, you won’t be in charge of
ordering such tests. But as I discussed in the previous chapter, less polished forms of
prototypes have become easy to make, and you can make them yourself, no developer
required, at even the earliest stages of design.
Before I started working in UX, when I thought of a prototype, I thought of those
space-age-looking concept cars that I would never be able to drive, not only because they
were one-off experiments that could at times be described as priceless, but also because
they weren’t street legal or even built with working engines inside. After I got into UX,
the concept at first took on the new meaning of a functioning stand-in for the real thing.
The thinking was that prototypes needed to be near real to test on subjects, otherwise
people might not take tests seriously and engage fully enough with the product. The better
I got at prototyping, the more I learned to return to my original way of thinking about
them, as hypothetical constructs—as a way of testing the future. Which brings me back to
innovation. Prototyping is no longer an expensive luxury; it’s actually the cheapest way to
find out if something conceptually fantastical is in fact practical.