Part Three: The details · Before anything else
Makers know their product too well to see it fresh, and testing sounds like a project. Watching three people try to use it will show what no review can.
After a few months of building something, you cannot not know how it works. You know the button is called Archive because someone argued for it in March. You know the second step is optional. Your eye goes straight to the right place, so the page looks obvious.
That is why design reviews go the way they do. Five people who all know the product debate whether a newcomer will understand it. Nobody in the room is the newcomer.
The remedy is so simple that teams distrust it. Sit one person down in front of the product. Give them something real to do: "You need to move Thursday's appointment to Friday." Ask them to say what they are thinking as they go. Then keep quiet and watch. Within minutes they will click the wrong thing, read a label as something else, or stop and stare, and because they are talking you will hear why. You will want to reach for the mouse. Don't.
What keeps teams from doing it is the idea that it must be done properly: recruited participants, a lab, a report. Steve Krug's advice in Rocket Surgery Made Easy is the opposite. Set aside one morning a month. Bring in three people, one after another. Have the team watch from another room. Over lunch, agree on the worst problems you saw, and fix each with the least change that will do. Three people are enough, he argues, because the serious problems are not subtle.
None of this needs permission or a budget, which makes it the one piece of research anyone on a team can start.
Therefore:
Every month, watch a few people try real tasks with the product, thinking aloud, while the people who build it look on in silence. Then fix the worst problems you saw with the smallest change that works.
In practice. This week, ask one person who has never seen the product to do its most common task while you watch. A colleague from another department will do. Write down the first place they hesitate.
Goes with. This looks at your product in a room. WATCH WHAT THEY DO (20) looks at work in the wild. What you see sends you to FIX WHAT'S THERE FIRST (25). It tests every pattern after ONE SCREEN, ONE PURPOSE (61).
Source: Steve Krug, Rocket Surgery Made Easy (2010).