I've never accepted a graphic design proposal that I didn't run by someone outside of the company to be sure, from a usability standpoint, we weren't taking a step backwards using symbolism, layouts, etc, that someone outside of the project would be confused by. Or where their initial reaction would be "that site reminds me of a spammer/virus/porn site". Such a "spammer" comment killed one design right away because until then I didn't realize it, but they were very much right.

Edit: I wanted to note that this applies to designs my teams make, the design that I make, or designs we get outside designers to make. I'm confident that it helped us make better products by getting external sanity checks on designs before rolling them out.

Designers are trained for designing for other people. So unless you are only hiring shitty designers then I would say usability testing isn't bringing you any value what so ever.

You are welcome to prove me wrong, but you will be hard pressed to find any evidence.

Of course your design can alway be improved. But the real question is whether those improvements are making you that much more successful.

And that I don't believe is the case.

Of course, I work in state government, so the process is a bit different than a startup. However, I still think there's a healthy amount of humility that is gained from watching customers use your design.

I am against testing on users in pseudo environments such as mockups, wireframes, designed but death screens and even most types of prototyping.

Getting someone from the outsides opinion is nothing more than that. An opinion. But it is often taken as gospel and have way to large effect on the actual development of the product/service.

And in my experience whether that is government, large and small organizations and startups. The problem persists.

Don't test something that isn't real on end users.

But ya my views are a little extreme.

I agree with you that it shouldn't be taken as gospel. I disagree with you saying it doesn't have a place and shouldn't be done. As with all feedback, you have to give it the appropriate weight and factor in the likeliness that it was an off-shoot.

It sounds like your issue isn't the data, it's how some clients/people weigh that data. Is that true?

And to great success might I add. We have turned the process around and am now advising our clients to save those money for later after the product has launched.

We have had no more problems than we used to and now we have budget to fix it where it matters instead of having to have the client find even more money.

The problem is that giving it the appropriate weight still doesn't solve the problem of transcendence between findings, decisions and design. So the problem is with the entire process rather than people or data.

Usability testing is concerned with improving usability and obviously if your usability doesn't make it useless then you are in better shape than if not.

But there is quite a range from completely useless to useful to best UI you can ever imagine.

And to most clients it really isn't before they launch that they will get the feedback that matters.

And as I have said repeatedly. Improving usability isn't in itself improving your product in any shape or form that makes it more or less successful. Yes if you make it useless then obviously it matters. But no one worth their pay does that.

So instead. Get good designers who both can do UX and the visual side and you wont need to plaster it up with in most cases useless time that could be spend improving the actual product rather than some pre-state of it.

I hope you continue your successes! After my own fifteen years of product engineering, I personally do not have the courage to push forward with a major design (be it code, product, etc) without some external feedback validating it.

There are however almost infinite evidence that no product launches without a bunch of things that needs to be fixed.

But here is the trick. There are nothing that shows that there are more to be fixed if you don't do usability testing on end users.

So that way you have saved yourself both time and money for getting feedback where it matters. After product launch.

And that to me is the most important point.

And I am not saying, don't get external feedback. I am saying don't get external feedback form users on mockups, wireframes etc. They are in no way in better shape to give you proper feedback.

How could they be?

I tell my clients that results-oriented design is the way to go. Interfaces are never "done," and it pays to pay a designer to stick around and iterate after real-world testing is completed. Casual focus groups are a great way to start this process, often ensuring that you don't launch with a poor design out of the gate.

Personally, I think this lesson was how the conceptually similar but significantly cheaper Mac Mini was born.

Really? You want your customers to accommodate you? If a company is at the point where they're hiring a graphic designer, then they probably have many outside parties they need to communicate with. Assuming that the graphic designer is of such importance that they should accommodate you is presumptuous. The ideal, of course, is for both parties to explain how they prefer to communicate and figure out a compromise.

Here's another theory: If I'm outsourcing part of a project, I will provide a specification for the work including any constraints I require, you will submit a proposal including estimates of how much it will cost and how long it will take, and I will consider your proposal and decide whether to accept it. You will be available at reasonable times for me to communicate with you, you will provide regular updates as the project progresses, and you will inform me immediately if your estimates are going to be incorrect, or I will not pay you. This is what is known in the business world as "how things actually work if you're the one providing the service and the other guy is the one paying the bills". Final hint: if you don't like being asked for a ballpark figure because it's hard for you to give one, then you were right about one of us being a beginner, but you have misjudged which of us it is.

(Edit: I would agree that co-operative discussions and effective communication are the best way forward in most business relationships. I just think the ideas in this particular article are so obviously one-sided in favour of the designer that no serious client is likely to employ the designer's services on that basis, so they aren't really very useful at all.)

"Here, I made a layout for you": Unless you really believe you are as good as the designer you're hiring, it doesn't make sense for you to actually do any designing yourself. Guidance, yes; clear specifications and limits, yes; a concrete design, no. If you could do that, you wouldn't need to hire anyone. It's like hiring a photographer and telling him, "Here, I set everything up. You just push the shutter button." Obviously you're the customer, but you're not getting much bang for your buck if you insist that the primary design be done by an amateur. It's trouble for me and it usually does mean a worse product for you (not out of spite, but because I'm hobbled by an ill-thought-out design that the client drew up in 10 minutes on a napkin and insisted be followed exactly).

"How much does X cost?": This isn't about having an open-ended budget. It's about providing a clear specification. Asking for a budget without any kind of specification is asking for disappointment later on. For example, a business owner asked how much a blog would cost. I gave a relatively low number to set up WordPress and do a simple theme. After further questioning, it turned out that when he said "blog" he meant something more like "Facebook competitor." Even better is "How much does a website cost?"

"I want to show this to my <spouse/friend/child>": This isn't unreasonable, but you shouldn't treat any one person as "the public's opinion." Unfortunately, many people do. For example, I worked with a guy whose wife thought it would be awesome to put pictures of her poodle all over a business website because the dog was so cute. Everyone else who saw a design with the dog was completely perplexed by it, but she loved it.

I respectfully disagree.

For one thing, a (graphic) designer can provide a variety of related services, and some of them may overlap other experts on the team, such as the user interface team or a web usability specialist.

For another thing, this presupposes that the designer is the only such expert involved in a project. For larger projects, this may well not be the case, and there may be someone setting the parameters for the overall system and then a number of designers responsible for implementing the general rules in specific areas.

> Obviously you're the customer, but you're not getting much bang for your buck if you insist that the primary design be done by an amateur.

You imply a false dichotomy. I can't speak for others, but on several projects I currently work on we might outsource things like graphic design, artwork and typography to a specialist, but want to retain direct control of the overall layout and interactive elements. In one case that comes immediately to mind, that is because we have extensive knowledge of usability issues from a previous version of the software that no designer joining the project fresh would have. In another case, we have web-based access and various apps for mobile devices, and we want a consistent overall look and feel across all versions of the service, so while the designer is free to fit the branding to the natural style on each platform, they don't get to move everything around in a way that could confuse our users. These decisions are not made by amateurs, they are made by specialists whose job is to analyse hard data and make these decisions. I wouldn't ask these people to decide what kind of antialiasing to use on the web buttons, and I wouldn't ask a graphic designer without the relevant knowledge of our products to lay out the user interface.

Someone who provides a layout is telling the designer what they need and asking for it to be improved. You get better results this way. If a designer told me this was bad for them, I would use someone else. Saves me from getting something unusable back. That said, I think this designer is in the minority. Most are more professional and realize design needs to be contingent on tech/usability factors they may not understand. So they want information and ask questions when they see ways to improve things.

I'm sure this isn't how you work, so it's hard to imagine other people are like that, but just like there are some unreasonable contractors who ignore your specs, there are unreasonable clients who can't hold up their part of the professional relationship.

It shames hardworking designers that believe in honest work, open communication, and finding creativity in constraints.

Like a) the rest of don't have families and b) it's going to make me want to compete with free. :)

"Here's 50% up front."

"I'll pay upon delivery."

"Let's set up a retainer."

These phrases get ya top priority. Fast.

http://000fff.org/design-discussion-principles-how-to-get-yo...

Definitely lean toward that side of the fence, but honestly, for any designer/developer, the most important thing you can have as a client is a clear idea of the direction you want to take. Have your idea prepared, write notes, know your competition - write it down. do your research!!

once that's done, it's easy then to go ahead and deliver. before then, you are stuck in the loop of domain discovery which is just a time sink with no easy-way-out.

Too bad. Here's a layout. Make it work.

asking for a “ballpark figure” before giving details just makes you look like a beginner

Boo hoo. Now give me ballpark figure.

How much time do you need? It takes a lot of thought, back-and-forth, and revisions, all of which take time.

Yes, it's a common practice in Fantasyland to afford content creators all the time they desire to go off into the forest and think about fonts and palettes ... no, please take all the time you need, and tell me what it costs after you're done taking three weeks to decide what the exact border radius for my site should be to convey just the right sense of whimsical Gestalt but not too pretensious, and don't even bother giving me an estimate, and please tell me how to run my business while you're at it too.