Comments on: Are you doing your user research on the right people?

By: Does culture affect online behaviour? « Webnographer Blog

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 17:42:20 +0000

[…] Dr. HarryÂ BrignullÂ points out it is critical to use the right participants for your usability testing. If you restricted yourself […]

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By: Response to 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Designcontent strategy, Information Architecture, user experience, UX « Brain Traffic Blog

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 04:26:33 +0000

By: Alexis Antonelli

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:25:16 +0000

I am glad you brought this up, because when I speak to folks I very often hear that this is the kind of testing they do, and it always makes my skin crawl. I guess it can have its value in the sense that if you get folks with the appropriate level of “Internet savvy”, you can test for the most basic usability with specific tasks such as searching for a specific keyword or seeing if they understand a design pattern, but you’re not going to find out if the product is useful or desirable, nor if you’re asking the user to conduct the tasks that they would really conduct.

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By: FeraLabs » Blog Archive » Does culture effect online behaviour?

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:45:13 +0000

[…] Dr. Harry Brignul points out that it is critical to use the right participants for your usability testing. If you restricted […]

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By: Harry Brignull

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:16:09 +0000

I think it’s a real mistake to design a product or service for “everybody” without taking the time to deconstruct the user-base.

If you genuinely are in the business of designing for a very wide user base, you should segment your users to make sure you are addressing all their needs.

Having said that, if you have really poor usability, pretty much any old random person can be used to point that out. Right?

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By: David Hamill

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 13:49:14 +0000

sorry i can’t spell

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By: David Hamill

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 13:48:50 +0000

I have to agree with Cam Beck here. There are however some sites that I wouldn’t even bother testing if I couldn’t recruit reprasentative users.

The big problem I experience is clients taking a market research attitude to recruitment. They then get all intricate about things that won’t make a blind bit of difference.

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By: Top posts this year on on 90percentofeverything.com- 90 Percent of Everything

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 11:17:26 +0000

[…] Are you doing your user research on the right people?: this article is a bit of a backlash against all the articles that claim it’s a good idea to recruit random people to participate in your user research. It’s not. Although it’s better than nothing, street recruitment is the bottom of the barrel. […]

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By: Are you finding the right participants? « User Experience for Non-Profits

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 20:52:49 +0000

[…] Brignul illustrates the dangers of using just anybody as a usability test participant on his blog, with some convincing […]

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By: Nick

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 19:00:27 +0000

Absolutely! You definitely want to make sure that you’re talking to the right people, but I think that the less specific your application the more general you can be in your choice of representative users. For example, if you were working on interfaces for a new kind of TV, you could conceivably recruit random dudes from the street on the basis that he or she would most likely have a TV or have used or watched one. As always, It depends (TM).

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By: Cam Beck

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 17:15:10 +0000

“but my point is, why bother? ”

It depends entirely what you’re trying to develop. Especially with websites built for non-specialized audiences, there is a mountain of useful information you can get from non-representative users.

You bother if you don’t have the budget or time to perform a formal test. In other words, if it’s the difference between doing no test and a test with non-representative users, perform the test.

There are many clients who still subscribe to the myth of the genius designer (or the genius in themselves), so they’re reluctant to invest the time and $$ for testing.

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By: Harry Brignull

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 06:20:07 +0000

@Howard – yes, non-representative users can give you useful input on baseline usability, but my point is, why bother? If you’re going to spend all that time and effort doing research, you may as well get the right people in. The price of an outsourced user research project with the wrong users vs one with the right users is typically less than a 10% difference.

Your point about requirements analysis is of course true – but the idea that requirements analysis is a phase that is timeboxed right at the beginning of a project, then is never thought about again – that’s an old school software engineering concept. When you’re using a UCD process, requirements analysis is done mostly at the beginning of a project, but then continues through the course of the project in a diminishing manner as you iteratively prototype your product. Starting off by showing real users early low-fi prototypes is an excellent way of validating and nuancing your requirements.

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By: Howard

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:19:45 +0000

I agree, to an extent. I believe it’s possible to get insight from non-representative users… but only on aspects more granular than perhaps high level requirements or needs as in the case you describe.

In fact, the case study seems more like a case of poor requirements analysis. Building software that has no use is a different failure to that of building useful, but difficult to use, software.

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By: Jenny

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 07:12:32 +0000

Another key point here is that you don’t define the competitors to your product – the users do.

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