Jeff Gothelf, Director of UX, TheLadders.com. @jboogie
Ignite Talk: "How to 'Do' Lean UX in 5 Easy Steps"
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Ignite is a fast-paced presentation style that gives tech entrepreneurs the opportunity to share lessons learned with a room full of drunk entrepreneurs. But there's a catch: presentations are limited to exactly five minutes and twenty slides--and those slides advance automatically every 15 seconds.
"Hey Spool, Mike and Steve,
Nice post! Krug's Rocket Surgery book where I learned about developing good tasks.
Basically, he says to test the participants interaction with the site not their ability to read. "buy a bookcase" tests the participants ability to read and, in this case search. That's not bad! It gets at the usability / mechanical functionality of a site. But, you don't need to go through the trouble to recruit users to collect this type of data. Anyone hanging around the hallway will do.
However, if you want to dig down to the other parts of the experience (findable, desirable, Morville's honeycomb types), then a more authentic, believable, contextual task is important.
By changing the directive command - "Find a bookcase" - to a more contextual based question - "How would you do that?" - you were able to get a different and possibly more insightful / actionable result. As a matter of fact, from now on, I'm using this format for all my user tests. Done and Done, Mr. Spool.
@Mike - (A/B) test your (user) test? I smell recursion and an out of memory error. :)
cheers!
newman"
It does seem that when business owners aren't knowledgable about a tool or service, they just want to know what it will cost them. That's fine. Money is our 'lowest common denominator'. It's the medium of exchange. Our currentcy. Business owners want to know about price. We, UX'ers, want to talk about value. Value is price over utility. If the price is zero, then whatever the ulitilty, the thing will be worth it.
"3 fantastic days with User Experience Professionals from all over the world. 16 workshops to develop your skills, 10 talks to inspire you and 16 slots open for you to share your experiences. All this coupled with lots of parties and meetups in sunny Lisbon."
"Recently I wrote about User Stories and how card based software development can help identify 'clear, brief descriptions of functionality as described from the perspective of a user'.
Today I want to look at how User Stories or 'Stories' can impact the user interface (UI) design and user experience (UX) of a software product."