I am a UX designer, and my task in a desktop application development is to discover what is the need of the users and how they would want to use it. It's a UX designing job plus customer discovery/understanding job.
Now, the target segments of my customers are professionals (engineers/sales), and being in an Asian country ( south east asia to be exact), even the professionals are not good in expressing what they want and what they need. I have a hard time to get them talking and express their opinion. When I present my prototype in front of them, usually they would not have any opinion at all.
In the end, I feel like I am wasting time preparing prototype since either their feedback is usually lame ( "can you make sure that the text box doesn't overlap with other text box"? Yeah, I know that bug, but it's just a prototype, can we move on to something bigger? Like the overall userflow and how would you use the application?), or worse still, there is no feedback.
The users either don't know how to tell what they need, or they don't even know what they need.
How to get them talking in a fruitful way as far as application development is concerned?
Answer
Taking this question as more about how to get feedback on prototypes*, that is quite straight forward - You need to set them tasks so that they are focused on using the prototype to achieve a goal.
This could be things such as "From this screen where would you go to find out information about Red MacGuffin Shoes?" or "From the point of view of a typical user, how would you find the contact number of this company?". Things like that, although you want to cater the tasks specifically to the target audience and site purpose of that particular project. Ask them to vocalize their thought process as they go, and watch how they progress to see if what they say they are trying to do matches their actual actions.
In addition to giving them some tasks to complete, ask them to rate the prototype against some subjective heuristics such as the famous Nielsen ones, although there are many, many usability heuristics out there to use. Obviously which ones you choose to measure would depend on how high-fidelity your prototypes are (you can't get them to evaluate the language used of you've still got Lorem Ipsum everwhere).
*You're sort of coming at things from two directions at once - firstly you say you're having difficulty identifying the requirements, and secondly you say that once you present the prototype then you don't get any useful feedback - well I don't really understand how you got to the prototype stage without having any user requirements identified - what is it you've used to build against?
No comments:
Post a Comment