Usability Quote of the Day

October 20, 2006

Whenever we capture the complexity of the real world in formal structures, whether language, social structures, or computer systems, we are creating discrete tokens for continuous and fluid phenomena. In so doing, we are bound to have difficulty. However, it is only in doing these things that we can come to understand, to have valid discourse, and to design. -- Alan Dix, p. 427 in "Upside-down A's and Algorithms - Computational Formalisms and Theory"   (via interaction-design.org)

Saturday, July 16, 2005

Peter Merholz Interviews Jared Spool on User Research Methods

An excellent interview with Jared Spool on how he goes about website design ...

"Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz recently talked to the founder of User Interface Engineering Jared Spool about user research.

Peter Merholz: So someone comes to you, and needs to better understand why their site is or is not working. How do you set up the approach that you’re going to take? How do you know what kinds of methods and what kinds of research will get the desirable results?

Jared Spool: Well, we start with trying to understand the business. One of the first questions I ask them is why do they think they need to do any research, which interestingly enough they almost never volunteer without prompting. What I’m looking for is the business rationale behind the research. You know, research costs money, there’s no way to do it without costing money, there’s expensive research, and there’s inexpensive research, but it always costs some money. So the question is: Why spend any money at all? So when we’re looking at working with a client, we want to understand why they want to spend the money. It’s almost always because they figure they’re going to make it back with the information they’ll gain, but we need to understand what that information could be. Doing research just for the sake of doing research is a losing proposition. We’re looking to enhance people’s business."   continued ...   (Via Via adaptive path)

More information on this topic at User Experience Week ...

User Experience Week - User Interface Design, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Ergonomics

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

<< Home