One of the biggest mistakes most people make in their strategic planning or design processes is to disregard the very people their service is aimed at.
Customers shouldn't just be passive observers in the process - they should contribute to it throughout.
Traditional user testing provides numerous benefits, but it has some limitations too - primarily that it can take too long, cost too much, and can be viewed more as 'homework marking' than as a positive input to the design process.
Design-integrated testing.
We support a more proactive approach throughout our projects, using user observation and research techniques to feed critical information directly into the design process. There's nothing worse than discovering something important in a test session that can't be addressed in the project because it came too late, or the report took a week to receive.
Our integrated testing allows for user insight to be fed into the design process immediately. We often test one day with the client present, discuss the outcomes at the end of the day, and feed the conclusions into the next day's design work. We can even adapt the testing during the day with some testing techniques to explore an idea raised during the test.
Stand-alone testing.
Of course, we can also carry out stand-alone testing for you. Generally these tests form part of evaluation or strategy projects, but sometimes more detailed reports are required for internal reporting or risk management within projects.
We regularly conduct user studies that stand alone from projects, to provide assessment of a market segment or to identify how well a site is performing. Why not test your competitors' sites to identify areas of weakness that you can exploit?
In these cases, we typically offer a more cost-effective alternative to traditional usability companies.
