Test Early, Test Often
How to take better advantage of your most valuable resource: users
A key hallmark of user experience design is talking with users and aligning with their goals and needs. Most of the focus, however, is in two key phases: conversations up front to discover product needs (discovery and generative research) and another round once a concept has been laid out (usability testing). These research phases are, of course, essential to product development. Without each of these in your process, you’re just doing UX theater, not actual design. But your interactions with users need not be confined to just these two steps. Every single point in your process and every artifact you produce can — and should — be tested and validated with users.
If you’ve successfully convinced your leadership that talking with users is valuable, perhaps you can begin to convince them to slowly expand the number of places in the design process where you can engage users. You can test literally every part of the design process and I want to highlight a few key places you may not have considered.
Research plan
It’s very tempting, especially in a world with limited research budgets, to build out a research plan and run through it with multiple participants all in one short burst. This gives you a whole host of…
