Show me examples of companies who wouldn't be a success if it wasn't for the usability testing they did up front.
If it's so well proven that should be easy for you.
You are confusing improvements to an established already successful e-commerce company with creating one from scratch.
It's quite obvious if you already have a successful site you can adjust accordingly which is exactly what Amazon do all the time. Because that is what e-commerce sites must do to keep sales up.
"The best you're going to get is anecdotal evidence that early stage usability testing caused significant pivots around the core concept and assume that these pivots are generally positive.
Much of the customer development stuff Steve Blank talks about fall into this category."
In other words. There is no evidence what so ever. Thank you for proving my point.
I have 15 years of anecdotal evidence that there is no correlation between Usability testing and successful products.
And I am still asking you to provide evidence.
Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, LastFM, 37Signals and so on. None of them to my knowledge did usability testing before they launched their products.
Again you are welcome to prove me wrong. With regards to Steve Blank then I don't think that is what he is saying.
Look, I'd love to discuss this further with you but this format is getting too annoying. Feel free to ping me at AIM:shalmanese@gmail.com MSN:hanghangz@hotmail.com if you want to continue this.
Oh, I just noticed that we sparred before around this post: http://000fff.org/getting-to-the-customer-why-everything-you... about the exact same issue (I am Xianhang Zhang). I don't know if we're going to get any more productive the second time around.
Proving usability testing works when creating a product has the same problem with proving something like agile development works. Every project is unique so you never know how things would have turned out if you did things another way.
The best you're going to get is anecdotal evidence that early stage usability testing caused significant pivots around the core concept and assume that these pivots are generally positive.
Much of the customer development stuff Steve Blank talks about fall into this category.
It just doesn't matter in the beginning.
Show me examples of companies who wouldn't be a success if it wasn't for the usability testing they did up front.
If it's so well proven that should be easy for you.
You are confusing improvements to an established already successful e-commerce company with creating one from scratch.
It's quite obvious if you already have a successful site you can adjust accordingly which is exactly what Amazon do all the time. Because that is what e-commerce sites must do to keep sales up.