Garbage in, garbage out. (anonymous)

Now, I know this one applies to computing in general. It’d be a pretty easy stretch to apply it to user research, though, wouldn’t it?

I mean, if you don’t get the right users, you don’t get the right data, right? Same thing goes with a crappy test script or a poor prototype as well. 

And speaking of that last bit, I have noticed a huge difference over the years in the quality of the prototypes I put in front of my users. Now, is that because the skills of interaction designers are slowly eroding somehow? Actually, that’s not the case at all. In fact, I’d say those have been steadily improving.

In this case, what seems to be slowly eroding is the quality of the tools they have to work with. Hard to believe that we might be going backward in that regard, but there is no doubt in my mind that Invision, the tool du jour, is a far cry from the prototyping tools I used in the past, ones like Axure or iRise. Yeah, they weren’t that easy to use, but they sure did give me nice prototypes. Invision? To me at least, it seems like it’s maybe a notch above PowerPoint. Honestly, as it stands now, users can’t type in data entry fields! Try getting some realistic feedback with that!

To tell you the truth, it’s the same with some researcher tools as well. Like everyone else, my company is using UserTesting. For setting up a moderated test, it works like a charm. There are some serious issues with unmoderated tests though. For one, I can’t vary order. So, unless my test is a single task, I’m missing something that’s been basic to usability testing since the very beginning. There are plenty of other issues, but to me, not being able to control for order effect is a show stopper right there.

So, what’s the problem here? What is going on? I blame MVPs, minimum viable products. The going model these days seems to be not making a good product per se, but in getting something out there, capturing market share, and making yourself the only game in town. 

All the other stuff that might make your product truly useful and superior? Well, I guess you can take care of that when you get around to it.

Though sometimes attributed to IBMers George Fuechsel and William D. Mellin and dating back to 1960 or so, Atlas Obscura thinks it goes even further back