If you use Sketch and Alfred, this is a great little workflow for quickly finding Sketch files. You can just open Alfred, type ‘sketch’ and then a filename and it’ll find the file for you.
I put together a similar one for Photoshop – just open Alfred, type ‘PSD’ and then start typing the filename and it’ll show your PSD. Hit enter to open the file.
A short presentation I did at work on understanding how products are used, using Instapaper as a case study.
A fairly well-worn truism in UX is ‘you are not your user‘. It’s usually meant as a reminder that you as a designer/developer inevitably have a level of technical expertise that the majority of users will not have. It’s also a reminder that what makes sense to you doesn’t necessarily make sense to anyone else – which is why design practice involves a lot of iteration and user-testing.
But it’s also useful as a check when you feel the need to pontificate on other people’s software products. For example, if you feel like you can dismiss a software product with over 1 billion active monthly users as ‘gullible’ or ‘people who love to talk but have nothing to say’ and declare ‘it can’t be fixed, it’s over’, then you have made the classic error of presuming your needs and desires map to everyone else’s. They don’t.
First week at the new job went well. Profero’s a digital agency, so I’ll be doing more comms campaigns, websites, that kind of thing. Looks like I’ll be doing a lot of prototyping, guess it’s time I finally (re)learnt to code.
I’ve almost finished a prototype for work and have set up a nifty little testing studio with Magitest, Reflector and Invision. With this setup I can put my prototype in the user’s hands and let them play with it, and Magitest will record all their interactions with the prototype, as well as their reactions and comments.
I’ve also spent a fair bit of time running through the testing script, to ensure I get useful feedback. As Nathanael notes, just putting a prototype in front of a test candidate is highly likely to result in artificially positive results.
The problem with sticking a prototype in front of users without any idea of the success criteria is that there is a very good chance the prototype evaluation will be a success. Why? Because you invite people to participate in the activity, probably pay them for their time, put them in front of something that you’ve probably worked on (or they assume you have) and they’re more than likely to say that they like it, that it’s good and yes they would probably use the actual product.
