Ida Aalen

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

- Julia Sagar

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.”