97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 84. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Coworkers as Usability Participants

Daniel Diener

In digital product development, iterative and continuous testing is a success factor. But conducting research with the target group can be time consuming and expensive. Testing products with colleagues from outside the project offers a valuable alternative. They can be easily recruited and will give you relevant feedback on the usability of your product. Because if the product doesn’t work for your colleagues, it will fail for your customers as well.

Especially if you have a product for which it is difficult to recruit the target group, usability research with colleagues is essential. When we started to work in sprints in our organization, user research was always kicked out of the sprint planning because recruiting our customers was always time consuming and tedious. We also have only a limited number of total customers, and therefore we need to use their time wisely. This has led to issues conducting iterative usability research with customers quickly, which can be the death knell for fast research.

With our two-week sprints, we wanted to test small iterations continuously. So we started conducting usability studies with colleagues from other departments, whether accounting, purchasing, or another area of the organization. We recruited five colleagues for each sprint and tested our ...