testing, testing....

In November the leaves change and the minds of irrational designers turns to tool testing. Our initial iterations have led us to a set of tools to:

1. distill and make irrational behaviors easily understandable

2. flesh out relationships between different biases

3. provide examples and case studies for grounded learning

4. understand where users perception of an offering's and its intended value proposition are different and to generate solutions that better align these

5. highlight specific "irrational situations" and indicate what researchers should look for and how designers might compensate

6. help designers develop solutions that strategically counter or build off of user perceptions

7. delineate perceived losses and gains over time so designers can use strategy templates to improve the value proposition for users.

We'll be testing and refining these tools over the next couple weeks before integrating them in both book and workshop form. While everything will still be a work in progress at the end of the semester (and beyond), we're optimistic that this can give early inroads towards using these concepts for better user hypotheses going into research and more successful offerings in the market.