[Sigia-l] User Test Cost - Does this sound reasonable?

[Listera]

Jared M. Spool:

> However, developers often have direct and indirect influence over the user
> experience. They are making decisions about error messages, flow, and
> performance. All of these impact the user.

Nothing (well, practically, nothing) that directly impacts user experience
should be decided upon by Developers. In my world, Developers should
build/implement the app created (and hopefully prototyped) by Designers. All
user experience issues should be the domain of Designers, including how well
an app performs, from the POV of the user.

> (This happened recently when the design team we were working with were told
> that a certain list box couldn't be populated because of an indexing issue
> -- it would just take too long to display the data and there was no way we
> could work around the problem. The team struggled with several workaround
> design solutions, none of them very satisfactory. As soon as the
> responsible developer sat in on some tests, he had several ideas on how to
> change the underlying application infrastructure to accomodate the original
> design.)

This is a great example of two notions I've been promoting here for years:

1. Designers (especially enterprise-oriented ones) should understand the
technical ramification of their design choices.

2. Developers should build/implement the functionality specified by
Designers.

In your particular example, the developer should simply be told to find a
solution, period. How he does it is his problem. The point is that he
doesn't need to sit in any user test to find out that indexing is needed,
which is my point. The scope of his problem is that the performance of a
specific component isn't optimal. The scope of the Designer is that this
rate of performance is degrading user experience. In other words, Designers
shouldn't tell Developers how to implement, and, in turn, Developers have no
business testing aspects of user experience.

Usually the problems start when the two sides invade each others' territory.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba