Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Jared Spool on User Research Methods (15 Jul 2005) PM: So you’re using these executive suites. How do you see your approach to something seemingly well understood as lab-style user testing? How is your approach different from what would be considered standard? JS: We don’t have one-way mirrors, or television hook-ups, we typically have the observers in the room. The users are let completely in on the whole thing in terms of they understand why we’re there and what we’re doing. We have to keep the client anonymous, we do, but the users are partners with us. But other than that, it runs basically the same as any test. There’s a facilitator, a script, depending on the nature of the test, we use, for instance a lot of interview-based task techniques, so there isn’t so much a script as there is what we call a focus list. Article URL: http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000516.php Read 50 more articles from Adaptive Path sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Cinemas set for digital revolution     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy