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"A while ago there was an article where a woman was trying to user testing in a mall and instead found an old guy who had literally never touched a computer."
by usrusr 7y ago
"A while ago there was an article where a woman was trying to user testing in a mall and instead found an old guy who had literally never touched a computer."
I believe that this approach to UX testing is to blame for some of the most infuriating UI changes: when you design UI experiments with actual users you do that because you want objectivity. And what could be more objective than selecting "perfect blanks" as you test subjects?
The problem with this approach is that everything you gain in objectivity is lost many times over in relevancy. Those people are not representative of your actual users, not even when you are building a geriatry self-serve kiosk.
Unfortunately, once that kind of experiment has taken place, it inevitably dominates all other concerns. Every critical voice will reliably get shouted down with "We have the numbers to prove it. We did science, you didn't. You are just a grumpy old power-user disrespecting the needs of the weak".
- pmontra 7y agoI agree. That old guy is not a computer user, so there is no need to build a UI for him. To further this point, imagine testing HN with people that can't read. Do we rebuild it for children under 6 or do we wait they learn to read and grow to an age that let them make sense of the contents of the site? And a car analogy/tale. If you drive different models of different makers you find many little differences and unobvius ways to operate some controls. I remember I had to read the manual of a rental car 25 years ago to figure how to reverse. I had to lift a ring on the stick and I never saw something like that in my life as a passenger or as a driver before (and I barely saw automatic gears by then.) That was not very discoverable. However one shouldn't bother to design car controls for elderly people like my mother. She never got a driving license, she'll never will and yet she had no problems living their life. Not everybody needs computers.
- nitrogen 7y ago"We have the numbers to prove it. We did science, you didn't. You are just a grumpy old power-user disrespecting the needs of the weak". Well put. What's the counterargument? There has to be a way to solve this problem.