Usability in practice

Abstract

The adoption of user experience methods within companies has followed a similar evolution over the past two decades. Typically organizations originally institute formative lab-based evaluations, and then add field studies and other user experience methods to their repertoire. This evolution typically occurs because the organization recognizes the need for more data on customer profiles, feature requirements, and task flows, along with the ability to iterate quickly among various design ideas and directions. These methods that fall outside of the categories of formative usability evaluations and field studies are addressed in this paper. Although there are a wide variety of methods within this 'alternative' category, a few representative samples will be discussed in more detail here. In actuality, these methods are not 'alternatives,' rather, they are additions to the toolkit of user experience methods that should be used in conjunction with formative usability studies and field studies.