[Sigia-l] Evaluating the evaluators

[Peter Jones]

Well, Jared, its not a waste of money if the company hiring you finds out
they need this check on the foxes after they have already gone too far and
they need a way to manage the design firm. This happened a LOT in the late
90's, and early Oh-Oh's, when there was a lot of money to waste. (That's
what led to my business called Redesign Research, which specialized at first
in "doing it right the second time" for these companies that spent all their
money the first time following a Big Name Design Firm and getting a
ultra-slick, unusable site).

And I have never seen studies on product managers outperforming
usability/design teams. I have seen it happen once or twice, but usually in
collaborative efforts the dividing lines are not so obvious. What I'm
referring to are situations where product managers willfully disregard the
data and the interpretations of the data and do what they were going to do
in the first place. That can happen when we fail to rubber-stamp the
concept. I have found that inability to listen usually also extends to the
larger market, and have found few exceptions in the high-end (for pay)
online products I usually work with.

Thanks for the response!  Nice to get some feedback -

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: Jared M. Spool [mailto:jspool at uie.com]


At 01:55 PM 9/4/2006, Peter Jones wrote:
>In large, multi-consultant projects, independent usability evaluators
>sometimes conduct parallel tests to those done by the lead contracting
>firm. I have been hired to be the evaluator when a large, expensive
>design firm
>(fox) also proposed to do their own testing (henhouse).

There's a technical name for this technique. It's called "Wasting Money."





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