Research & Testing

We recently came across a thread from Tanya Snook about organizations practicing “UX theater” — you “take the user’s perspective” and use a ton of sticky notes but don’t really include actual users in your process. Honestly, it hit close to home because we’ve been there.

In 2015, we knew something was wrong when it was hard to point to the last project where we’d talked to a user of the product we were designing. We talked a good game about usability, and followed best practices (thanks Luke W), but didn’t really understand anything about the people who would be using the products we created. So we set ourselves a goal — Do Research on Every Project.

We haven’t quite gotten to the point of doing research on every project, but we now do research on many (if not most) of our projects. I’m happy to say that you too can move beyond UX theater to real user-centered design. It will take work to dig yourself out of that hole, but it’ll be worthwhile in the end.