[Sigia-l] User Groups for Research?

[Andrew Boyd]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 10:59 PM, Jonathan Baker-Bates <
jonathan at bakerbates.com> wrote:

> Seeing as nobody replied to my last post about in-page navigation
> (apart from Paola off list), maybe this will elicit something:
>
> Does anyone have any experience of setting up and managing a "user
> group" for the purposes of conducting trials of new features on web
> sites? That is, a group of people of whatever type (domain experts,
> laymen, whatever) who can be contacted for field trials, opinions etc.
> in order to inform design decisions?
>

Hi Jonathan,

yes - across 10 years and four different client sites, I've helped to set up
and manage groups like this. They've been called pilot groups, consultative
groups, or user groups, depending on the client culture.

Because I work mostly in government, there are a lot of inter-organisational
political sensitivities to deal with. Apart from having a 'captive'
population for testing new ideas, the user groups help all the different
areas to feel that they are involved - that is, they cannot come back later
and argue that they were not fully involved in the process. Much of the way
that we work here in Canberra is around making people feel included in the
design process - it not only has to work, it has to be seen to be working
for all concerned.

And that goes double when there is a joint government/industry or
federal/state government project.

They have mostly been nominees by the areas/organisations concerned, which
usually means the squeakiest wheels - what I have found is that once the
design is accepted by these folks, they become the biggest evangelists
around (which is both a blessing and a curse - an unscrupulous designer
might be tempted to work on convincing these people more than creating a
truly elegant design).

I'm not sure of your exact situation - the above may not work in a
traditional commercial product/site environment.

Best regards, Andrew

-- 
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Andrew Boyd
http://onblogging.com.au