How to create a shared understanding among development teams and clients.

In addition to allowing the detection of usability issues, user testings are instances to build a shared understanding between team members and clients.

This understanding is built progressively at each iteration during the project. The first step on that path is to get rid of the notion of self-referential design.

What is self-referential design?

Self-referentiality is an immature stage that design and development teams go across characterized by the belief that  users are the same as those who design the interface.

During this stage the product decisions are made based on what each team member:

• Knows
• Likes
• Thinks is good
• Has been told is good
• Has seen elsewhere

The problem with this situation is that it usually produces cyclical discussions based on personal opinions rather than observed facts. This can severely erode relationships and generate significant roundabouts in a project.

Testing with users provides information based on what people actually do when they use a product. Thus,  personal opinions are set aside and relegated because of the evidence surveyed during observation.

Implementation phase

The second instance where user testings are valuable for building shared knowledge is when the project enters the implementation phase. During this stage, technological constrains fully manifest, either by the chosen platform, implementation schedule or other external processes that affect the product.

Many of these constrains lead programmers to make decisions that end up modifying the interface. Usually this is solved with documentation (costly to produce, always incomplete, and that nobody reads in full) or through team meetings that try to build consensus through fragmented views of the product.

In this moment, user testing brings back the focus on what is important for end users and gives factual information to understand the impact of technological restrictions.

Build a shared knowledge with the client

Sometimes organizations have strong opinions about the characteristics that a solution must have or what  users need. Often these opinions are not based on factual information about users and what they actually do with a product or service. A frequent cause of this problem is the use of innapropiate survey techniques for  interface design, such as, focus groups.

There seems to always be a gap between the organization's goal and what users can or are willing to do with a product or service. Therefore, the participation of the customer during testing sessions is essential, as it allows to know which part of the organization's vision is validated by the user behavior and what part need adjustments.

Frequently it is hard to convince customers of the importance of participating in user testings because, user testing is mistakenly considered a technical issue and not relevant. However, the effect of witnessing user testing sessions is not comparable to reading a report with a few static slides summarizing results, and prepared by a third party.

Benefits of involving clients in usability testing sessions:

• Dispel suspicions of manipulation or error in the results.
• Generate less documentation.
• Get consensus on the main problems to be solved.
• Develop new hypotheses to solve those problems.

It is important to note that any observers participating in user testings should be present in most of the sessions, following the rule of that the smaller the number of users, the greater the number of tests that must be witnessed (seeing only one or two tests can lead to wrong conclusions).

For example, if you have decided to test a total of six users, observers should be present in all six of them to correctly identify behavior patterns and not draw conclusions based solely on a couple of observations.