5.3 Public places, at the mall, on the street

Just chatting up random people at the mall or on the street (while sitting alone on a bench for example) might be off-putting at first but it will most likely be rewarded. Mozilla’s Jennifer Lynn Morrow made a great experience with user testing in the wild: The mall is a fantastic place to find user test participants, because the range of technical expertise varies widely. Also, the people I encountered tended to be bored out of their minds, impatiently waiting for their partners to shop or friends to meet them. Morrow (2011) She writes about her encounter and quick user test with a man who never used a computer before: One of the hardest things to relate to Joe is the idea that you must first click in a text field in order to type. Morrow (2011) This kind of person would rarely, if ever, come up in a standard usability test where people are recruited based on specific criteria. But they are incredibly insightful because they are not that biased based on previously used interfaces.