Comments on: Making decisions about user research

By: 10-minute talks « UX Australia Conference 2009

10-minute talks « UX Australia Conference 2009 — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 22:32:48 +0000

[...] year (at Edge of the Web) Donna Spencer presented her UX Equaliser as a conceptual tool. 10 months later from the mindmeld of the Perth UX community, after testing, [...]

By: DonnaM » Blog Archive » Conference season

DonnaM » Blog Archive » Conference season — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:57:25 +0000

[...] Web standards group Canberra (4 Feb): Talking about user research, why we don’t do enough of it and my new user research decision diagram [...]

By: Web Design - ZachBrowne.com

Web Design - ZachBrowne.com — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 03:54:45 +0000

[...] Spencer has put together a handy tool and thought process for working out how much user research to do for a given [...]

By: Donna Spencer

Donna Spencer — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:11:41 +0000

@Gordon – thanks. I have no intention of ever making something more complex than it needs to be

@Pat – that is so dangerous, isn’t it. Looks like user research, smells like user research, but completely made up…

@Steve – I think I’ll put the internal/external idea in Existing knowledge when I pad this out. Just because people are internal doesn’t mean you know them, and vice-versa.

@Jen – damn, I knew I was missing something important!

By: Jen

Jen — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 08:11:33 +0000

Surely this needs to be in a honeycomb diagram? How can this be a valid model if it isn’t in a honeycomb diagram?

By: Max Design - standards based web design, development and training » Some links for light reading (11/11/08)

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:42:14 +0000

[...] Making decisions about user research [...]

By: Steve Baty

Steve Baty — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 08:24:19 +0000

Donna,

I like this set of dimensions for modelling when to undertake user research. I think you need an additional dimension for internal — external for whether our users are from within the organization or outside. The further ‘away’ the users are from us, the more we need the research.

Steve

By: Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease » Blog Archive

Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease » Blog Archive — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 12:37:41 +0000

[...] all say we should do lots of user research, and then nobody does. Why is that? Donna has some good thoughts. I do think there’s more to it than that though, it’s just one of those things [...]

By: Patrick Kennedy

Patrick Kennedy — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:31:07 +0000

Good thinking, I like this.

One factor I’ve come up against lately is “how easily we can confabulate user needs”. It’s easy to dismiss research when you can just make stuff up and convince yourself that’s good practice by using different terminology (like giving your self-fulfilling-prophecy-use-cases the name “user stories” and “validating” them by getting the business to “sign-off on them”).

By: gordon

gordon — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:15:06 +0000

Hi Donna: I really like the tool you’ve started here. I think a key will be keeping the tool simple. Maybe just add some explanations and guidelines to quantify, and then leave the decision making up to the IA (or whoever is using the tool). Otherwise, if it gets at all cumbersome, people will just not do it, I suspect….

Gord.