7.9 Evaluate new features
Establish a workflow for going from a planned or suggested feature over implementation to user research and improvements.
- Feature is suggested by developer or user, gets evaluated in review.
- Feature is implemented by developers.
- Call for user testing on new feature. Results are gathered by UX team.
- Improvements are implemented and tested again. New functionality needs to be tested thoroughly, especially if it addresses a previously found usability issue. This is best done in cooperation with the developers to already evaluate the features before implementation and prioritize the results of research. With new features it is important to discern actual usability issues from problems people have (or think they have) just because the interface is different than it was before. For that, you should ideally test with people who never used the old interface and thus don’t compare the differences. This pattern was developed in collaboration with Ilya Zhitomirskiy of Diaspora. Also see Thomas (2008): Establish a process for usability specialists to contribute to a project.