Ida Aalen
NET|September 2016

The Norwegian UX designer explains how smart user research can help you solve the right problems and even win new clients

Julia Sagar
Ida Aalen

By her own admission, Ida Aalen is a very impatient person. “If I see something that doesn’t work, I get an urgent need to fix it, ” she laughs. “It’s almost a problem. When I see tourists on the street holding their map upside down, I have to go over and help them.”

It’s hardly surprising, then, to learn that Aalen is a champion for user testing, both in her day job as senior UX designer at Oslo-based digital design agency Netlife Research, and in the wider web community. “Some problems are more messy and complex than others, ” she explains. “Strategy is a way of digging into what the problem really is – what is it that we really want to achieve? And user research is a way to make sure we’re fixing the right problems in the right way.”

In May, Aalen’s article ‘Never show a design you haven’t tested on users’ (netm. ag/tested-284) received widespread praise when it was published on A List Apart. In September she’s set to explore the topic in more depth at Generate London, arguing that testing can be a key strategy for winning new work, and offering practical tips for fitting it into even the most resource stretched projects (netm.ag/aalen-284).

As Aalen herself points out, everyone knows the best way to make sure your designs work is to test them with real users – so why, if user testing is so self-evident, does more of it not happen? “People think it’s more expensive, more difficult and more time-consuming than it really is, ” she explains. “Sometimes there’s maybe a fear of finding a weakness in our designs. But I think we should embrace this as designers, rather than thinking our designs should be perfect from the start. If you find a weakness in your design, that means you did your job: you found it.”

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