Core77

Short and sweet piece on common mistakes made in usability research. Here's a bit about the delusion caused by "Conducting Pretend Research":

Let's pretend our user's name is Jane. Let's pretend she is 38 years old, drives a purple Prius, reads mystery novels, loves bulldogs, and likes to go sailing. Let's pretend she comes to our website and likes feature A but not feature B. Therefore, we should develop more things like feature A. See? We're very customer-centered.

and an outline of the entire piece:

- Not conducting any customer research
- Making decisions based on made-up user profiles
- Conducting the wrong type of research
- Using predefined tasks in usability tests
- Not inviting stakeholders to attend usability tests
- Not prioritizing findings from usability tests
- Not relating research to business objectives
- Missing the larger strategic picture

via Good Experience