UX Central Weekly #8

Many insightful and useful things to report on this week. Starting with some great research results from Jared Spool in Fast Path to a Great UX: Increased Exposure Hours. He talks about exposing your entire team (not just UX analysts) to user research.

the number of hours each team member is exposed directly to real users interacting with the team’s designs or the team’s competitor’s designs. There is a direct correlation between this exposure and the improvements we see in the designs that team produces.

Each team member has to be exposed directly to the users themselves. Teams that have dedicated user research professionals, who watch the users, then in turn, report the results through documents or videos, don’t deliver the same benefits. It’s from the direct exposure to the users that we see the improvements in the design.

The teams with the best results were those that kept up the research on an ongoing basis. It seems that six weeks was the bare minimum for a two-hour exposure dose.