Week 9: Does It Actually Work?

Testing whether the frustrating design you built on paper is actually frustrating once a real person tries it

3 May 2027

Being annoying and being effective are not the same claim, and this is the week that finally forces the distinction. Everything you’ve built so far was designed to be frustrating in theory; now you find out whether it actually is, on someone who wasn’t told what was being tested. People are, on the whole, more resourceful and more stubborn than a design brief tends to assume, and this week’s evidence is usually the most humbling of the semester.

Outline#

• what to measure: completion time, errors, abandonment, confusion, success rate, clicks, perceived difficulty
• why a silent observer is the point, not an oversight
• a failed prediction is still a result — it’s what tells you the interface didn’t do what you thought
• Human Guinea Pigs, this week’s session
• the Hostile Design Experiment is due today