Top 8 Usability Mistakes
- Not conducting any user research
- Conducting “pretend” research
- Conducting research, but the wrong type
- Conducting one-on-one research, but with tasks defined beforehand
- Not inviting stakeholders to attend research
- Not prioritizing findings
- Not relating to business objectives
- Missing the larger picture
Read the original blog post for more details.
This list is a great way to communicate general rules to stakeholders. However, I had a couple questions on #2 and #4:
What would you consider to be “pretend” research. Does that mean making claims of research that never happened, or using the wrong type of user?
With the rule of not defining tasks beforehand for 1-1 research, for contextual inquiry and retrospective interviewing, this completely makes sense. What is your stance on using think-aloud usability testing as a research method?