04 Mar 2007 0003H

Usability testing by other means: ethnography and kaizen in lean manufacturing

This article from the Total Experience blog goes into how a researcher videotaped manufacturing workers on the factory floor to look for process improvements, which is kind of like watching a usability test but without giving the participants directions (since they have their own already). What is really useful about this is that the workers and managers get involved in the discovery and design process, in essence, participatory design. Since they are the experts and the end users of the process, they have tacit knowledge about what works best for them, practices encoded in various workarounds and daily routines, that might not come up unless you watched them go about their work.

The beauty of the approach is that it is quick and cheap, so if you’re trying to “accelerate time to value,” as we say in consultant-speak, your investment is low in time and effort, but return on that investment is quite high: sell the methodology to the ROI.

Lots of things can be learned from watching people trying to go about their daily tasks without asking them how they do them, which I find tends to alter the observation. As a result, we have to use a multiplicity of methods to balance out the shortcomings of methods. The numbers can only tell you so much, which is where the qualitative comes in.

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