This actually happened to me once.
It started out as a nice New Year’s Day. I hadn’t partied too hard the night before, and wasn’t finding it too difficult to wake up.
Just then, though, I got a call from, of all people, my boss. Now, she wasn’t the type to call and wish me a Happy New Years, so I scrunched my eyes, tilted my head, frowned, sighed, and picked up the phone.
What I could make out from her somewhat incoherent call was that something was terribly wrong with the new look and feel for our authenticated site that we had just rolled out on the stroke of midnight. Turns out users did not like it. The issue, which seems to indeed have started on Twitter, had gotten all the way up to the second-in-command.
To remedy the situation, the higher up wanted to do some emergency usability testing. “Some what?” I enquired. My boss tried to make some sense of it and explain it to me. We talked some more, and eventually agreed to come in to the office to just to make the higher-ups happy. They were going to supply us with some customer names, and involve some others so I could coordinate testing times with them. It was all a bit crazy.
Luckily, none of this could really happen (on New Year’s Day, mind) without a major act of government, so it all eventually petered out.
Now, here’s the kicker … We had actually done some usability testing – actually, lots of usability testing. Turns out they had just ignored all my results. But that’s a topic for another post.
