You've created a prototype, now test it with some users. Here's where you're gonna learn. User testing is your chance to compare your mental model with your user's mental model. So in the example from our book, from our reading today, sketching the user experience. We talk about this fax machine they were testing out. Gosh, I detest fax machines. But it's not really for their functionality, it's for their dysfunctionality. They're just, to me they represent everything wrong that could go, that could happen that could go into a user interface. So many ridiculous buttons that are not intuitive. But think about it. Somewhere there was a designer who's sitting there laying out that dial pad with all the extra buttons. And they thought to themselves, okay I'll put a choice for my users. Do they wanna go high speed or high quality? So, HS for high speed, HQ for high quality. And the user will understand that. Well the user's thinking okay. I am just looking at this for the first time. I don't even know that that's an option, so it doesn't occur to me. But what does occur to me is HQ means Headquarters. I see a button that says Headquarters. Why would I press that? Now I'm just kinda frustrated, cuz I don't know what the HS stands for. If that stands for HQ, what is HS? Now instead of having being able to take advantage of this feature, because I don't wanna read the freaking manual, that's for sure. I'm just not gonna know about that feature, and then I'm just gonna be angry. And then I'm having a bad experience. And if you had just tested that with me first, you would've learned that and not created this user interface fiasco. User testing is for your user to wow you, it's not for you to wow your user. I'm gonna say that again. User testing is not for you to impress your user. Its for your user to impress you with their insights, with their feedback, they're telling you the problems or the things they like they're gonna reveal these amazing insights to you about the product that you though you knew so well as soon as you start user testing it, you expose these great opportunities to add more value. This guy got a lot of that. Timothy Prestero created an incubator solution for babies that are born premature and need that extra heat when they're little. He created this machine that was so beautiful, won these awards. You'll hear about it in this TED Talk and what he really learned after he'd already wasted, unfortunately, too much time and effort, and money. He took it to some of the users in these developing countries, and really saw them interact with it, was wowed by them, doing this user testing, and then made something that legitimately started saving people's lives. [NOISE] >> I've got a great idea, its gonna change the world, it's fantastic, it's gonna blow your mind, it's my beautiful baby. Here's the thing, everybody loves a beautiful baby. I mean, I was a beautiful baby. Here's me and my dad a couple days after I was born. So in the world of product design, the beautiful baby is like the concept car, it's the knockout. You see it and you go, oh my god, I'd buy that in a second. So, why is it that this year's new cars looks pretty much exactly like last year's new cars? >> [LAUGH] >> What went wrong between the design studio in the factory? See today I don't wanna talk about beautiful babies. I wanna talk about the awkward adolescents of design those. >> [LAUGH] >> Those sort of dorky teenage years, we are trying to figure out how the world works. I'm going to start with an example from some work that we did on newborn health. So, here's the problem. Four million babies around the world, mostly in developing countries, die every year before their first birthday or even before their first month of life. It turns out half of those kids or about 1.4 million births around the world would make it. If you could just keep them warm for the first three days, maybe the first week. So this is a newborn intensive care unit in Kathmandu, Nepal. All of these kids in blankets belong in incubators, something like this. So this is a donated Japanese Atom incubator that we found in a NICU in Kathmandu. This is what we want. Probably what happened is the hospital in Japan upgraded their equipment and donated their old stuff to Nepal. The problem is without technicians, without spare parts donations like this very quickly turn into junk. So this seemed like a problem that we could do something about. I mean, keeping a baby warm for a week. That's not, you know, that's not rocket science, so. We got started. We partnered with a leading medical research institution, here in Boston. We conducted months of user research overseas, trying to think like designers, human centered design, let's figure out what people want. We killed thousands of post-it notes. We made dozens of prototypes to get to this. >> Here's what we talked about today. A mental model. That's one thing that the unit testing can help you with. Figuring out where your mental model is not aligned with your users, so you end up with having a product that doesn't help them. User testing is for your user to wow you, remember that, you're not trying to impress them. And the Timothy Prestero talk, he emphasizes designing for people, considering manufacturing and distribution, knowing the real life conditions, and designing for outcomes.
