Comments on: Usability testing at conferences http://www.dexodesign.com/2007/07/29/usability-testing-at-conferences/ Russell Wilson's blog about incremental/evolutionary design, navigation, layout, interaction design, information design and all things "software interface". Sat, 22 Nov 2008 22:04:21 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.3 By: Steve Portigal http://www.dexodesign.com/2007/07/29/usability-testing-at-conferences/#comment-5 Steve Portigal Wed, 01 Aug 2007 21:27:00 +0000 http://blog.dexodesign.com/2007/07/usability-testing-at-conferences/#comment-5 Very cool example of opportunism in recruiting for a study. The point that it was still tough to get people to participate - that it still took work - is something not to be understated, it obviously took some extroversion to do it. Congrats on doing that; it's neat when you have a group of users in one place and you have access/permission to do something like that.<br/><br/>Recently we went to a corporate retreat where the members of an internal group we had been working with were spending a couple of days meeting and planning. It was the first time this global team had met. We were asked to be there; there was some idea that we would be able to grab people for very brief conversations. I didn't think this was valuable since we were trying to go beyond the surface and the obvious stuff, but as it turned out, we weren't even given permission to do that. But we were still asked to be there as a "presence." It was a VERY long day of internal meetings that had no relevance, and not the bonanza of user insight that you've described here! Very cool example of opportunism in recruiting for a study. The point that it was still tough to get people to participate - that it still took work - is something not to be understated, it obviously took some extroversion to do it. Congrats on doing that; it’s neat when you have a group of users in one place and you have access/permission to do something like that.

Recently we went to a corporate retreat where the members of an internal group we had been working with were spending a couple of days meeting and planning. It was the first time this global team had met. We were asked to be there; there was some idea that we would be able to grab people for very brief conversations. I didn’t think this was valuable since we were trying to go beyond the surface and the obvious stuff, but as it turned out, we weren’t even given permission to do that. But we were still asked to be there as a “presence.” It was a VERY long day of internal meetings that had no relevance, and not the bonanza of user insight that you’ve described here!

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