Epilogue
SCOTT Berkun
A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for. —William Shedd
Last piece of advice: if you want buy-in, do a great job
It’s important to get stakeholders to buy into UX research. It is even more important to do high-quality research work. You cannot get buy-in from stakeholders for crappy research. Invest more in becoming a knowledgeable researcher and in performing high-quality, relevant research. This work will serve you well and will become a solid foundation for stakeholders to be more involved, engaged, and appreciative of the value of your work.
The final story in this book demonstrates how important it is for UX research work to meet high standards.
Quality and Usability
Rolf Molich, Owner and Manager, DialogDesign, Denmark
To get stakeholder buy-in, usability professionals need to deliver useful and usable results. We must practice what we preach by paying attention to the quality, usefulness, and usability of our own products. Some of our procedures, such as usability testing, are no longer “anything-goes” works of art. Rather, they have become industrial processes that can and should be measured for efficiency, quality, and adherence to commonly accepted standards.
Clients have asked me to assess the quality of usability tests carried out for them by renowned usability agencies in eight countries all over the world. All quality assessments have been remote – I have not attended the actual test sessions. Assessments are based on usability test videos and test reports.
Clients want uniform and state-of-the-art usability tests across countries, including countries whose language they do not understand. They also want to be sure that they got what they paid for so that they can safely make important decisions based on the usability test results. Almost all the usability professionals involved in these tests had impressive portfolios and credentials from renowned universities.
The findings were interesting. Only one agency out of eight passed without serious issues. The rest all got one or more serious or critical markdowns on their adherence to generally accepted procedures for usability testing. No one has challenged the procedure or the findings or the assessor, so it seems that we have a generally accepted common body of knowledge.
Usability problems mainly showed up in the usability test reports:
Unusable executive summaries – missing, too long, or vague
Too long – the quality of a test report is not proportional to its length
There were also usability problems in some highlight videos:
Inadvertent help from moderator during test session, often because moderator talks too much
Unrealistic test tasks or tasks with hidden clues
Fewer participants than agreed with client – “If a test participant doesn’t show up, that’s the client’s problem”
Attention to quality pays off. As the software guru Gerry Weinberg puts it, “If you don’t care about quality, you can meet any other requirement.”