Entrepreneur Looking for Technical Partner

My User Experience Design Practice

Watch your customers

Designing a great and usable product is very difficult. One of the ways to bring yourself back to reality through this process is to watch your customers use your site. It's surprisingly counter-intuitive and, in fact, the idea seems kind of dreadful. I think the main reason that we are afraid of this simple step is that we know it might force us to make changes and potentially rework our entire product.

One misconception about usability studies is that it's something that has to be done on a large scale and cost a lot of money. This is not the case. In fact, studies done this way are unlikely to really influence your product, because the study is done only one time and frequently the results are too late in the process to influence new product design. Instead, you achieve a lot more by simply grabbing one or two people not familiar with your product and asking them to use it or accomplish specific tasks that are central to your product.

You can do this even before the product is designed. Draw it out on ppaper, or use your wireframes, or designs and ask the person to tell you how he/she would go about completing a task.

The best approach is to do this a few times throughout your design/development cycle to ensure that you can accommodate the feedback and build it into your product.