Guerilla Usability: User-Centered Design Without a Budget
- Chicago: Wednesday, May 19
- London: Thursday, April 22
Garret Goldfield
Full-Day Tutorial
User-Centered Design (UCD) is the foundation of what we do. Few people dispute UCD’s value;
unfortunately, not every company has a generous budget for it. Recruiting, testing, analysis,
and design often come with a high price tag and—all too often—UCD budgets are one of the
first to be cut in tough times.
Plenty of books, conferences, and websites give professionals information on how to engage in UCD
when they have the time and budget to pay for it, but few focus on doing UCD when there is little or
no budget to be had. Such knowledge requires years of experience with trial and error to determine
how to obtain reliable user data while operating at a minimal expense.
This tutorial compiles cutting edge techniques and practices used today in companies around the
world. Many of these techniques are not commonly known because the people using them seldom
publish their workarounds, shortcuts, and secrets.
This session will give you insight into how you can recruit, run usability studies, and manage
your user research and design logistics without breaking the bank. You’ll learn how to engage
in UCD and keep up with the big boys without their big budgets. You’ll also discover how to
get good, solid user data while still maintaining your bottom-line.
What You’ll Learn
In this tutorial, you’ll learn:
- How to determine whether you need participants and how to recruit them
- Who to recruit and how to recruit for minimum costs
- How to structure your UCD research in a cost-effective way
- Websites, equipment, and tools that are available and cheap
- How to sell your results in your organization to get funding down the road
Course Outline
UCD methods on a dime
- Methods that require participants
- Usability testing: Running tests efficiently and inexpensively
- Journal studies
- Contextual inquiry
- Surveys: Running your own or participating in other surveys
- Card sorting
- In-depth interviews
- The trade show booth
- “Hallway” usability and intercept testing
- Methods that don’t require participants
- Expert/heuristic reviews
- Competitive analysis
- Best practice analysis
- Forums/SIGs
- Peer reviews
- Task scenario analysis
- Screen readers
Recruiting
- Who to recruit
- Getting people cheap and where to find them
- Recruiting participants who won’t bias your results
- Family, friends, colleagues, students
- How to identify recruits
- Recruiting without a big budget
- Where to advertise
- How to create a meaningful recruiting announcement
- Recruiting without a large agency or dedicated headcount
- Cheap and free tools to maximize your time and exposure
- Traditional and not-so-traditional recruiting ideas that can be done cheaply
- Using other groups and companies to recruit for you: Take advantage of existing marketing efforts
- Recruiting for accessibility and specialized populations
- How to plan ahead for easier, cheaper recruiting in the future
- Compensating participants (or not)
- Payments, gifts, incentives, and “thank yous”: How to recruit for $5!
- Coordinating support from upper management
Running and analyzing the tests
- Who should and could conduct this research? The pros and cons of
- a one-man-show
- designers as testers
- interns (and how to recruit and retain them)
- Hardware
- Should you use the latest equipment?
- Recycle/reuse
- Websites and software
- Testing companies
- Research websites (know where to look)
- Survey tools
- Research locations
- High cost vs. low cost labs
- How to conduct usability research in non-standard locations, including coffee shops, offices, etc.
- Designing on a budget
- Paper prototyping
- Agile methods
- Outsourcing
- Results
- Reporting results with cheap tools that still “wow”—including numbers, videos, and anecdotes—and how to determine which one is right for your company
- Finding usability champions in your organization
- Using UCD results to get money for your group: Selling results to management and to organization sponsors
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lecture and exercises.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides
Who Should Attend
Anyone responsible for all or part of an organization's usability or user-centered design practices, especially where funds are tight. Anyone endeavoring to introduce or start up usability practices without a generous budget. This tutorial might also be useful to organization recruiters and managers.
Instructor
Garrett Goldfield is a User Experience Specialist at Nielsen Norman Group, where he consults
with clients in a broad range of industries, including ecommerce, automotive, health care, finance, media,
telecommunications, education, and nonprofits, as well as highly specialized B2B sites. Previously, Garrett
managed the User-Centered Design group for Intuit's Tax Division, focusing on incorporating UCD processes
within Intuit's development cycle for TurboTax software and its Web applications. Prior to working at Intuit,
Goldfield worked at General Electric’s Information Systems Division, where he conducted ground-breaking
work in ecommerce interactions for marketplace transactions; and at The Aerospace Corporation, where he
pioneered standards for HCI telemetry data presentation for Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. Goldfield's
research focuses on usability testing, contextual inquiry, and ethnographic user studies. He has also published
and presented on cost justification and ROI for usability practices, brainstorming methodologies, analysis, and
interpretation of qualitative user data.
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