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Did you ever notice that user experience is a lot like health?
User experience designers are doctors. Developers are surgeons. Users are of
course patients, and bad user experiences are like a disease.
I want to dedicate this article to the people who are creating these user experiences.
They are the ones who caused the disease in the rst placeby designing a bad user
experience.
They carry the disease. The good news is, they also carry the cure.
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The disease
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No! You just have to watch someone using a smartphone, a laptop, a tablet, or
whatever crazy device they just came up with.
Observing people is the easiest form of usability testing and its all it takes to see a
real user experience.
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Executive summary we provide our clients with, to inform them about our usability ndings.
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Whenever someone is doing a usability test for you, they have to communicate their
ndings.
They need to tell you what theyve found by showing you the data.
But data only represents the truth. Its not the truth itself.
If you want to see what users really experience, you have to observe them yourself.
Not only where they struggle; you have to observe everything they do.
What are they looking for? What do they want right now? What are they thinking? Do
they understand what were presenting them with? What kind of atmosphere did we
create for them? Did we create an enjoyable/comfortable/ecient experience for
them? How does it make them feel?
Not on some articial scale, but in their own words.
Not in general, but in every moment.
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But your questions are not part of what people usually experience.
How do you avoid these disturbing questions?
An easy way is to prepare a specic task scenario to engage your users.
Give them something to do and observe how theyre doing it.
Let them focus on this task and remind them to think out loud and say everything
they have on their mind.
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Forget about yourself and your own agenda and focus on your user.
Try to empathize and see the world through her eyes.
What is she experiencing right now?
How does this aect her mood?
Is there anything you should change to improve her experience?
How does this relate to what other users may experience?
Understanding what people feel and Why is far more valuable than we think.
Thats why we made Userbrain, and thats why we oer easy usability testing on a
regular basis.
Understanding what users really experience is like taking care of your patients.
Its one thing to look at the graphs and numbers, but its something dierent to really
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4 Comments
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5 months ago
Hi Markus, hi Stefan,
thanks for sharing your thoughts.
However, I strongly disagree with the metaphor you chose. The user is certainly not
the patient. It's not the user who has to be cured. "Health" is the norm, diseases
would be specic exceptions. Good "user experience" on the other hand is not at all
the norm, nor is it a unique occurrence, it can indeed occur in various shapes, colors
and functions. Sorry, but I think that just does not support a straight line of thoughts.
Also, it seems like the article got a bit out of hand. The title suggests you will present
a specic method to assess user experience. Instead the article goes on and on
about the general concept of ux, the imagined role of the ux designer, broadening the
concept basically to anyone involved in a digital project. And in the end you say:
we're doing user tests. You know, content also contributes heavily to user
experience. And not keeping a promise, in your case not delivering what your title
promises, does not really work in its favor.
I know it is a blog, so preliminary thoughts are of course allowed. And I imagine the
process of writing was probably interesting in an exploratory way. But I would
recommend not to share this type of stu in a professional network where people
know their stu. No hard feelings, just saying. You do not want to be noise, do you?
Have a look at Brad Frost's website: http://deathtobullshit.com/
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Stefan Rssler
Mod
10/13
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5 months ago
Hi Stefan,
I got here from a Xing Group for digital experts, Markus posted it there.
That's probably why I had high expectations when following the link. I
think the post probably works for sta dealing with online maintenance
within an organization. But for someone to really learn something from
this post, you would have to believe the reader has never applied user
tests or any other type of qualitative user research.
Maybe I was a bit grumpy last night when I wrote my comment. Sorry
about that.
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Stefan Rssler
Mod
You're right, the post is clearly aimed at people with no (or little)
experience with user testing and qualitative research in general.
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