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B.O.C.O. Strikes Again – Validate Your Solution and Vanquish the Beast

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The interactive digital journey to understand the UX Design Process and vanquish B.O.C.O. – “The Beast of Conflicting Opinions” – continues. Today, we unveil Test World.

The first world of the Defeat B.O.C.O. initiative explored the value of qualitative and quantitative research. The second expanded upon it, providing suggestions for using research to make visual design decisions.

While the Test World is our third world to be released, testing often comes before design and happens throughout the process. Regardless of when testing is done, however, the objective is to gather evidence. After creating amazing designs, your team needs to validate their effectiveness.

No matter how many testing results you have to support your design decisions, team members will likely still have conflicting opinions about how to carry them out. We hope that the journey through our new Test World will help you understand how to mitigate risk and reconcile differences of opinion.

In this world, you can expect:

  • A train ride across a snowy mountain landscape. Along the way, you’ll learn more about basic, unmoderated usability tests. These include trust, impression, preference, and blur tests.
  • A journey into a dark mountain cave. The solution of moderated usability tests – live user observation, time-based tasks, and screen recordings – provide the guiding light to navigate it. With these tests, you’ll have more insight and substantive evidence to mediate ongoing debate.
  • A free fall into a mineshaft. Here, you’ll learn about setbacks, how to overcome them, and how to quell the voices of self-doubt that are part and parcel of the design process.
  • An encounter with an engineer – “The Inventor.” He or she will help you fuse software and hardware together into a mechanically sound and delightful to use end product.

By the Test World’s end, you will have acquired four allies: the researcher, designer, developer, and engineer. Each one offers the expertise needed to stay the course and push toward the finish line of Delivery.

And be sure to take the quiz at the end of the Test World journey. By finishing it, you’ll bring an end to B.O.C.O.’s reign of business terror…and possibly earn some free swag in the process.

Ready to see for yourself? Jump into the DefeatBOCO.com worlds!

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Ben Spencer

Content Strategist

Ben has a passion for blending design and writing into a cohesive product narrative. An advocate for research, strategy, and discovery at the front end of any project, Ben excels in high-level thinking about how to most effectively tell a brand’s story in an authentic and relevant way.

Ben received Bachelor’s degrees in Film Studies and Religion from Whitman College, as well as a Master’s in Education from Lipscomb University. He studied UX Design and Content Strategy at General Assembly before joining Fresh’s team in January 2016.

Outside of work, Ben enjoys reading voraciously, watching horror movies, playing video games, and building his skill as an aspiring novelist. He spends every second he can with his wife and his two beloved Boxer dogs, California and Tennessee.