Software and web developers often wear many hats, but some lack the knowledge to design or collaborate effectively with UX designers and researchers.

As a user researcher, I’m always inclined to say, “Test everything, all the time!” when people ask, “What/when/how should we validate with users?”

We’re tackling apps and softwares targeted to niche domains with expert end-users who have very specific needs.

On any given day, we perform numerous searches, many consciously and many without even realizing.

Product owners and stakeholders have a tendency to skip over discovery research and go straight to design and then go right to release.

In the end, everyone’s goal is the same: Build a great product, get market leverage, and make our users happy.

Lean UX and the Agile mind-set are all about efficiency - emphasis on forward progress, no project management bells and whistles, cut the deliverables, go-go-go.

User Personas help designers, researchers, product owners, stakeholders and investors understand a particular user type’s behaviors, needs, and goals.

As Agile principles and Lean methodologies continue to take center stage in product management and strategy, it’s easy to shoot right past the user research.

Are you a Product Manager looking to show some early design directions to stakeholders and end-users? Are you a Developer needing a little more direction from the design team? Or a UX Designer or Researcher trying to figure out how detailed your designs need to be to communicate your intentions and get valuable feedback from users?

We’ve taken our expertise and experience and used it to create a tool that will help us provide a successful, thoughtful, user experience design.

I’m a fan of Yahoo for news and email, but I’m not a fan of their new “two-tap rule.” The rule states that once a user is in a Yahoo application, it should take only two taps to do anything the user wants to do. Fast-to-use apps are the goal here. The two-tap rule sounds a lot like our field’s misguided “three-click rule,” which Expero cautioned against in 2007.

Q: In usability tests, people say our application is easy to use. But in the field, very few users are actually using the app. What should we do?

Q: How can we find people to be in our studies?

We’re redesigning our site, but there’s internal debate about whether the new design is any better than the current site. What’s the best way to determine which one is better?

Q: We run think-aloud usability tests at my company, but some people here don’t pay attention to the results because we don’t get much “hard” data. Do we need to run different tests?

Q: How can we optimize our site content for search engines but make sure it’s usable for people, too?

Q: We get feedback from users when we’re able to do usability tests, which is not often enough. What other sources are good for user data?

Q: What are the pros and cons of remote usability testing?

Q: My company thinks about customer requirements but does not think about end-users. What’s your advice?

Q: How do you do research for an online wellness program that spans the course of several weeks and measures changes to behavior over time?

Q: When evaluating a web site, what is the correct process to create tasks for a user test?

If management isn’t implementing changes based on usability tests, they might not be convinced of the value of the data you’ve collected.