Government’s Design Lessons
August 2015
90 minutes
Dana Chisnell
Usabilityworks
Why Dana?
Recruiting doesn’t need to be hard and doing it yourself has great value. Don’t believe us? Well, we’ve asked someone we consider to be the expert in usability testing to help you tackle this part of the process – Dana Chisnell.
Dana is the co-author of the must have book on user research testing, The Handbook of Usability Testing 2nd edition . Though much of the Handbook is about the process of usability testing, one of the major updates in the book from the first edition are about recruiting participants for usability tests.
Dana is an independent usability consultant and user researcher who founded Usabilityworks in San Francisco, CA. She has been doing usability research, user interface design, and technical communications consulting and development since 1982.
Dana took part in her first usability test in 1983 while she was working as a research assistant at the Document Design Center. It was on a mainframe office system developed by IBM. Since then, she has worked with hundreds of study participants, for dozens of clients, to learn about design issues in software, hardware, web sites, online services, games, and ballots (and probably other things that are better forgotten about). She has helped companies like Yahoo!, Intuit, AARP, Wells Fargo, E*TRADE, Sun Microsystems, and RLG (now OCLC) perform usability tests and other user research to inform and improve the designs of their products and services.