Real-Life Decision Making
You are a usability engineer and run your own consulting company. You've
been hired to gather feedback on a website. The website is already up and
running. You meet with the company. The people you meet with are from the
marketing department.
The people in the marketing department are obviously not happy with the
job the website designers have done on the website. The marketing team explains
that the new website was supposed to boost profits by 10 percent over the
first year. The targets were not met. They want you to report that the website's
failures are due to the poor design.
They take quite a while to show you many small errors on the site. They
do not like the navigation. They do not like the order that the pages are
displayed. They think the buttons are too small. Their list of complaints
begins to fill your notepad. The marketing team wants your report to be the
proof that they need to redesign the site. One of the men says to you, "I
need you to get feedback that says the navigation through this area is terrible."
Your standard procedure is to test a site first before making these kinds
of recommendations. It is possible that your testers will find similar problems
with the site, but you prefer to come to your own conclusions through testing.
On the other hand, as a self-employed consultant, you want to make your
clients happy.
But it is also possible that you will come to other conclusions after you
do user experience testing. You do not feel comfortable skipping the standard
research to suit the marketing department.
Susan Reale is a qualitative and usability research consultant with her
own company REALeResearch. She has been put in this position by clients.
"Morally, I can't do that. I wouldn't be doing my job. But I want to make
my clients happy."
What do you do?