I’ve heard a lot of bad ideas for user research over the years. Most of these have come from people trying to get around the time, cost, and effort of user research. I write about these in my latest UXmatters article, The Worst Ideas I’ve Heard for User Research. I discuss:

• Management trying to offshore UX work
• Management thinking that anyone off the street could moderate a usability test
• Using your own employees as research participants, because you can’t get the actual users
• Clients wanting to conceal their identities to participants
• Making research sessions too formal and uncomfortable by reading the opening instructions off a card
• A field study participant deciding to move the session to a conference room
• A participant changing an individual session into a group session with coworkers
• Teams thinking that they can save time by skipping the research report

Luckily all these bad ideas failed, but we can learn from them. Check out more in the article at UXmatters.

“innovatiebroedplaats” by verbeeldingskr8 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0