Why doing user observations first is wrong

"Let’s face it: once a project is announced, it is too late to study what it should be – that’s what the announcement was about. If you want to do creative study, you have to do it before the launching of the project. You have to be on the team that decides what projects to do in the first place – which means you have to be part of the management team. (HCI bug one: not enough HCIers are executives.)"

"...Usability testing is like Beta testing of software. It should never be used to determine "what users need." It is for catching bugs, and so this kind of usability testing still fits the new, iterative programming models, just as Beta testing for software bugs fits the models. I have long maintained that any company proud of its usability testing is a company in trouble, just as a company proud of its Beta testing is in trouble. UI and Beta testing are meant simply to find bugs, not to redesign.

So let’s separate the field and observational studies, the conceptual design work, and the needs analyses from the actual product project. We need to discover what users need before the project starts, for once started, the direction has already been determined. We need to embrace rapid, iterative methods. We need to fit the new procedures used by the programming teams, we need to become team players. What’s especially nice about these new methods is that they have made room for us: they explicitly acknowledge the importance of HCI design. Everyone wants us on the team, but only if we won’t slow down the work. More power to them."

Link: Why doing user observations first is wrong

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