I am completely excited today because tomorrow and Thursday I’ll be away from the office listening to real users talk about my company’s website and more specifically one of the products that I’ve been working on. At my old job, this opportunity came along with just about every project that I worked on, and I realize now that I took that very much for granted. At my new company we do user testing on the website maybe two to three times a year… a drastic change.
The benefit for me and usually anyone that has to do with product development, is that I can see what users want, here their thoughts and feelings as well as watch their reactions to certain ideas. These moments provide me with the ability to make better educated guesses as to what types of things will work for our users and which won’t OR even better which need to be changed. All of this is of course old hat for those of you that have been knee deep in the UX realm, but I was able to bring these thoughts to my forefront and really explore them and understand them.
Although I wish I got to see more user testing, going without it has taught me a LARGE number of lessons as well. We’ll see what happens this week!