This week was my first time to be exposed to the starting process of a usability study and all the preparation that is involved in getting your targeted audience. The process in which you write and organize your screener questions to help you narrow down a large potential population down to a small handful was eye opening for me. You want to have your eliminator questions, as I like to call them, right at the start, so you don’t waste the participant’s time or your own as a consultant, or the business’s as an employee. Yes, of course, you can hire a company, then budgeting their costs becomes a factor when you’re writing your proposal. Finally, once you have your target group now begins the fun part, when you give the user a scenario and where you observe a user going through your tasks that you’ve presented to them. Getting user unbiased feedback and listening to their feedback and watching them finding the challenges and opportunities in your product can be very rewarding because you know you have the ability to make something better. That is after all in the end as a user experience designer when I get the most reward from my work.
