41 shades of blue
Yesterday, as part of an OU course I’m doing, I conducted a few quick usability sessions on a UI prototype for a bug tracking application. I held four sessions with four developer colleagues, each one more enlightening than the last.
It was fun. The prototype was build in Axure RP and the sessions were recorded using Morae recorder. I can’t wait to sit down and sift through them for insights like a California gold rusher scouring for precious nuggets of usability wisdom.
But it also left me a bit empty. If only I had the time and resources to test more iterations of my design! To get a more diverse user pool: a few project managers, a few QA testers. To see if this or that bit of copy, this or that colour is more effective. How perfect the resulting UI would be. Dropout rates would fall, task completion times reduced by precious milliseconds.
What IF I had nearly unlimited time and resources to collect and analyze this precious feedback? Well, I’d be Google. And with that data I’d be slowly driving my talented designers insane.
The key thing in Douglas’ post about his reasons for leaving Google is this: obsession with data-driven design can ultimately stagnate an organization’s creativity and keep it from taking creative risks. So far this certainly doesn’t seem to be the case but in the meantime Google is down one brilliant chap.