In Spool’s article, the biggest takeaway for me is this: expose as much of my team as possible to first-person user research. As I lead research, I must continue to create ways to bring along developers and QA, in addition to product managers.
As we’ve been researching what design teams need to do to create great user experiences, we’ve stumbled across an interesting finding. It’s the closest thing we’ve found to a silver bullet when it comes to reliably improving the designs teams produce. This solution is so simple that we didn’t believe it at first. After all, if it was this easy, why isn’t everyone already doing it?
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The solution? Exposure hours. The number of hours each team member is exposed directly to real users interacting with the team’s designs or the team’s competitor’s designs. There is a direct correlation between this exposure and the improvements we see in the designs that team produces.
Fast Path to a Great UX: Increased Exposure Hours
Jared Spool, Linkedin, May 22, 2015