觀察與設計

The biggest downside to field studies is the cost to the organization. Scheduling the visits, taking team members out of the office for several days, and finishing the analysis can have a huge impact on a project’s resources.

The most successful organizations look beyond the current project, realizing that the value from the information learned will feed into future projects for years to come. Using this perspective, they amortize the costs across many development projects and it becomes an extremely cost effective method for gathering critical information. (這段其實和之前Norman爺的那句“Then when a project starts, hey guess what, the research has already been done.”有異曲同工之妙)

When we look at teams that are struggling to produce quality designs, almost always it is the result of spending time guessing and estimating user needs instead of working with actual data. Field studies can eliminate ‘opinion wars’ by replacing the strongly-held hunches of the team members with real information that describes what is happening. This is probably the biggest benefit that teams see.

– Jared Spool，《Field Studies: The Best Tool to Discover User Needs》