Having just survived the recent batch of AOL layoffs, my team and I are now coming to the realization that we lost our team of user researchers. Now, don't get me wrong - we have a user research team on the east coast and they provide a lot of valuable insight to us. But our team here was more integrated into the design process and were partners with the UI team. We have been spoiled by having these people on our teams. Whenever a project was put together, UI and research were assigned together as a team, sometimes even before visual design was assigned. As a team we worked together to identify where we needed user feedback and what types of methods to use.

I am coming to terms with this and now realize we need to get extremely creative about integrating user research into our process now that we have to do it ourselves. We are committed to continuing this important part of the design process and I believe we can't create good products without it.

Any advice? Tips? Tricks? How have you solved this problem? What types of low budget, guerilla tactics have you used? How have you compensated users with no budget?

Comments

Have you considered remote usability testing? See http://uzilla.net/uzilla/blog/ for more variations including desktop testing and critical incident reporting.

There is an article here that might be of interest.

http://www.evolt.org/article/Gorilla_Usability/4090/51076/index.html

thanks for the article leads - both look very interesting.

This is fast becoming a "must read usability articles" page -- so here's my contribution:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/us-tricks/?dwzone=usability

A lot of interesting insights here from a seasoned user experience consultant.