Saturday I read a fantastic article by Whitney Hess, "You're not a user experience designer if..." (and you should read it too). In it she brings up really excellent points about things that a lot of "UX designers" don't actually do. Things like: talk to users, design in a vacuum, make design decisions based on personal preferences, don't use UX methods, etc. While I completely agree, and shouted it from the Twitter roof-tops, it was a part at the end that caught my attention and made me decide to write this blog post.
If you have the title of User Experience Designer and you want to do these things but aren’t being allowed to, don’t stand for it.
I've been in that situation. A lot. In fact, it was not being able to do these things as an "interactive designer" or "interactive art director"(titles that I held for the first 4-5 years of my career) that caused me to almost give up on design completely, consequently find this whole thing called "UX Design" and figure out that I was trying to do "UX design" in addition to the graphic and interaction design I was doing. It's because of this that I passionately argue for real UX design. It's also because of this that I've hacked together some covert UX methods that you can use if you're in a situation where you want to do real UX, but can't.
First, a disclaimer
These are, more or less, methods I've used over the last few years when I just couldn't get approval to do real user research or testing. I will never, ever ever ever say these are "good" methods, they're just better than not doing anything. These are in no way "science" and are so far off from pure UX design methods that I'll probably get some nasty emails and comments anyway. Still, as I've been told by multiple people I really respect, "Any research/testing is better than none."
Also, I take no responsibility if you get fired because you get caught using these methods. I'm sorry, but it was probably for the best anyway.
Sneaky things you can do to make your designs "Human Centered"
Informal happy-hour individual interviews
Chances are you probably know some people on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/In Real Life that are like your users. (at least in someway) Can't do a real ethnographic study? Can't do formal, structured/semi-structured interviews even over the phone? It's time to head to the bar! Pick a few people and a few days, and individually take them out for a drink, preferably someplace where the music isn't too loud. Bring a notebook (or use an audio recorder if you can get away with it) and ask them questions. Ask them their opinions. TALK TO THEM. Try not to drink too much (at least until you're done.) The beauty of this is two fold. First, your participant's incentive is built in. Secondly, you can often times get a 2nd informal interview with someone that is in the bar who overhears you. Is there a sampling bias? OH YEAH, but if they pass your screening criteria take what you can get. More data is better than less in these situations.
Surveymonkey after-hours survey
Surveys are great, because they can kinda run themselves now thanks to the internet, all you have to do is write them. They're also great because you can get a 10 question survey with up to 100 responses per month for FREE, which means this one isn't actually going to cost you anything. (No this isn't a paid endorsement) 100 responses is good for 90% confidence (p=0.1) just FYI, so your results will actually have some statistical validity too! (assuming your questions are good)
Diary study with friends or others who will help you
So you can't go and run a full fledged ethnographic study, if you have really awesome friends who are close to your target user group you can get them to take a cheap notebook to work with them and self-report the things they do/frustrations they have/whatever you need to find out. Is it as good as observing? Nope. You're gonna miss a lot, I'm not going to lie. However, you're not going to miss as much as you would not doing it and just guessing.
Informal happy-hour cognitive walkthrough
This is a lot like the happy hour individual interviews, except you pull some of your coworkers instead. Bring your wires, or comps or whatever you need to test with you, and tell them you want their opinion on them. The key to this one is informal, don't ask for "stories about using X." This also has the benefit of slowing indoctrinating coworkers into the HCD fold, and slowly changing the culture to be more friendly to all of this stuff.
Paper prototyping on coworkers/friends/family/innocent bystanders
If they're close to your user base, draw them a quick marker comp and ask them to pretend it's your product and perform a task on it. (I've done this on napkins before, which is why it's always good to have at least one sharpie with you at all times.) This is a legit method (maybe the most legit in the list) when you want to quickly confirm a wacky idea without having to spend time doing nice looking wires or comps. I recommend this testing method for anyone working on an early stage of a project.
After-hours card sort
The Internet has made so many things better (like autotuning every sound in nature) including card sorts. Just like the survey, you can run an online card sort and kinda just ignore it except when you're setting it up and analyzing the results.
Websort.Net is by far my favorite card sorting tool, and it's totally free.
The bottom line
The real secret is that you can do almost any formal research or testing method informally, under the radar and on the cheap using your social network, assuming you're willing to put in some extra work after-hours. Is it perfect? No. Is it science? Kinda...it's probably got too many confounds to count though. But, it's better than nothing. Unless it's really really small, your network of friends and family online and off probably has at least a semi-representative sample of your user-base.
The real question is how to you present your results, or use it to argue your points? If you can get extra points for, "I did user research/testing in my off time" use it like you would if you had been allowed to do it. If not, just credit your awesome rockstar design skills. Say something like "You know, I just really get people" ...and then start looking for a real UX job.
