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Hello My Unknown Audience!

I have a come to a point in my day job where I would like to know how the users are actually using our application. For this I need someone or some people to do some usability testing, not lots, but some. Anything in fact, would be better then where we are now.  Let me give you a bit of background.

We design and build a product in New Zealand, and it is marketed and sold to clients in the USA. We, the developers don’t garner a lot of feedback from our management about how the users actually use the software, just the list of what’s wrong with it and what needs to be added e.g. bugs and feature requests,  the usual whip cracking.

Very few of the feature requests come from actual end users. The features and product direction are driven by management, not users. Which in itself is not all bad, they know the market and have a good understanding of what the product needs to be able to do to keep up with our competitors. However, as a developer who wants to improve the users experience of the application I would love to start doing some usability testing. Nothing exciting like setting up a special room with darkened glass windows where the developers watch eagle eyed the subjects use the application. Some basic Q & A with customers and someone observing how people use the application once a month would do!

Doing it wrong

So my question to you is, if you do usability testing at your company, how do you do it and how has it changed your product, has it proved beneficial to your product?

If you have no idea what usability testing is, have a watch of this video: Usability Testing, the least you can do.

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