You are not the User2
You are not the user. Nor is anyone on your development team, marketing team, sales, support or QA team. Your user is not even in your company. So why are there so many heated debates and costly decisions made in software development on assumptions of what the vision of a CEO or Product Lead thinks how their users will behave? Without consulting engaging or testing on their actual target users, this can be extremely costly in development cycles, even with the short sprints of an Agile environment. While interviews, surveys and focus groups are great in usability research, the real “deep dive” in finding core usability issues lies in user testing.
What users say they do, and what users actually do are almost always two different things. User’s tend to explain procedures they have taken in quick, to the point explanations. In these brief descriptions, much of the details of their actual actions are lost.
