Avoiding major screw-ups with Usability Testing and User-Centered Design
Front-end, User Experience and Design
This track covers delivering projects focused on the most important audience—the end user. Learn how to leverage Drupal to help you keep abreast of emerging trends in the mobile, componentized Web world. We’ll show you strategies for fostering collaboration between content creators, designers, strategists, and end-users.
Anyone who works on a product should be connected to the customers that use it. Everyone. This only makes sense - how can you sell, build, improve or manage something if you don't know what people think about it? Ignoring this data is a good way to create products people don't need, or can't use, or that miss deadlines and devastate budgets.
Learning about User Experience and user testing ensures that the blood, sweat, and sleepness nights that go into your X (apps, websites, code, marketing video, API, etc.) are worth it. If you're not trying to make somebody's life easier with your product, then why bother making it? If you don't care, neither will they. So learn how to build things right by directly engaging your customers, and incorporating their feedback directly into your designs at any stage. It works - just ask Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon.
Jonathan Rubin, Usability Program Manager at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, loves talking about the benefits of User-Centered Design to government, industry and academic audiences. He ran a federal-wide User Experience program at his previous position at the U.S. General Services Administration, and is co-chair of the Federal User Experience Community. He is a Certified Usability Analyst and former board member of the User Experience Professionals Associations' DC Chapter.