It's nearly summer in Chicago, so I've got bicycling on the brain. I was recently out visiting bike shops, trying to figure out which triathlon bicycle I should buy. I asked the bike shop owner the difference in aerodynamics, comfort and speed between two particular bicycles. He told me that one tested especially well in the wind tunnel testing for aerodynamics, but he also mentioned that he didn't put too much weight in wind tunnel data.
"Why not?" I asked.
He explained that in wind tunnels they don't often use people on the bikes, but dummies meant to mimic a human rider. He said it's difficult to get professional riders to spend the kind of time they need to in a wind tunnel. Of course, I thought, I would totally want to volunteer for such a thing! I'm a rider who wants to know how those data translate to amateur racing. These bike companies do a LOT of prototyping right on the spot, with different molds for pieces of the bike ready to be made to test different structures.
The problem is not using actual riders who aren't either dummies or paid professionals.
We face the same problem in using rapid prototyping for applications. We spend a lot of time in business analysis, making decisions with a business owner or UI expert. And we can create some pretty cool and complete visualizations. But formal usability testing with actual end users is almost universally a "nice to have," rather than a centerpiece of design and production. We end up with a lot of applications that should be great on paper, but often face many change requests from actual users.
I've mentioned in past blog entries that we need to use more specific data--and this posting is a continuation of that theme. But I'm feeling more emphatic than ever about specifically usability testing. Like with the bicycles, our rapid prototyping loses so much of its value when it's not tested sufficiently by its most common "riders."
The more I think about it, the more it seems crazy to ever NOT do it. And those of us who do visualization should be at the forefront of that push. Why use the wind tunnel without the end rider? Why use iRise without the end user on the prototype? Visualization provides an opporunty we didn't have before--to test usability before the application is even built. Let's push hard to take advantage of that.
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