User-insight labs
Written by SimonC
Over at good experience (link) Mark Hurst has an interesting twist on usability testing, calling it listening labs. His point is that usability testing is often too goal directed and tests what the company wants to test, often excluding the opportunity for the customer to comment what they want to say. This fits in with the recent realisation in design and marketing that a lot of market research asks what a company wants to hear (valuable as it is), rather than what customers want to say (often even more valuable).
source: flickr
Marks suggestion is quite simple. Keep the usability set up, but instead of being led by a task focus, have an open agenda, in which the user can comment upon how they relate to the company, its offering, its touch-points and experience. Then, once they have commented upon this, suggest that they show you how they use the web-site or service.
As Mark states:
most websites are a strategic representation of the *business*. How can you presume to know how customers relate to the business, unless you ask them first?… in the listening labs we had respondents from all their major customer segments. By the fourth respondent in each segment, we were seeing the same tasks, the same feedback, the same results – created voluntarily by the customers themselves.
I think this is a nice combination of methods and allows for both a period of open-ended comment and a session of goal-directed testing. One negative aspect is that the method might take a direction away from the module or part you have created and want to have evaluated. If you have just updated the sign-up process, the user might not choose this themselves as a task to show you. I don’t think this is a problem. My experience is that if you establish a good relation with the customer and are a good moderator, it is possible to ensure that the customers will carry out the task you need to evaluate too. It is after all a dialogue, and you have the chance to influence the direction of some parts of the discussion.
Ideally you should carry out listening labs early in a project to understand the customers perceived view of the service/its context, and then carry out listening labs later in the project, to evaluate the solution. Mark implies that all of this can be done together, and I think that cuts out one valuable part of user insights. However, I agree wholeheartedly that the traditional “scientific” approach to usability testing constrains the customer more than needed, and that the listening lab approach allows both to achieve their goals – there is nothing better than that.