:: Defending Your Position Through Usability Testing

Contrary to what your colleagues and clients might think, information architecture and interaction design are not exact sciences. If your client believes that there is only one solution to a design or interface challenge, there is a potential for a bottleneck when you don't see eye-to-eye.

So, we have to make decisions. IAs must decide when to take a stand, from a purist, ideological stance, and when to "give a little." Does having to make these decisions violate the idealistic nature of our profession?

Absolutely not.

The beauty of our discipline, is that we are able to "try out" new ideas before we dismiss them as "unusable." Usability testing is our way of auditioning different design approaches to determine which are intuitive to end-users.

You may be able to use one of these "stand-offs" as a way to secure funding for your usability tests.

Jonathan Lupo - VP / Information Architecture - Empathy Lab