plines of classic UX design:
Contextual inquiry. Before developing use cases, the team observes users
of current tools, noting where the pain
points lie. Contextual inquiry is often
helpful in identifying problems that
users are not aware of themselves. Unfortunately, this often proves expensive
and so is not always performed.
Formative testing. Formative testing is used to see how well a UX design
addresses a product’s anticipated use
cases. It also helps to determine how
closely those use cases actually cleave to
real-world experience. In preparation,
UX designers generally create lightweight prototypes to represent the use
cases the product is expected to eventually service. Often these are paper prototypes, which the test-group participants
simply flip through and then comment
upon. For the Polestar project, the UX
team used a working Java prototype to
facilitate early formative testing.
Summative testing. In summative
tests, users test-drive the finished software according to some script. The
feedback from these tests is often used
to inform the next round of development since it usually comes too late
in the process to allow for significant
changes to be incorporated into the
current release.
Although the Polestar team did not
have the budget to conduct contextual inquiry, it was able to work closely
with the software engineer who built
the research prototype responsible for
spawning the project. This allowed the
team to perform early formative testing with the aid of a working UX design,
which in turn made it possible to refine
the user stories that would be used as
the basis for further testing. Working
with the software engineer responsible
for the initial design also made it possible to evaluate some of the initial UX
designs both from a performance and a
feasibility perspective, preventing a lot
of unwelcome surprises once development was under way in earnest.
teRRY coatta: You mentioned you
worked early on with a software engi-
neer to iterate on some lightweight pa-
per prototypes. What was the role of the
engineer in that process?
