Introduction
One, in my opinion positive trend is that companies increasingly want to involve their potential users in the development. This can happen in many different ways: The spectrum ranges from market research interviews to data analysis of websites and various usability test methods. Testing is particularly important in order to obtain more intensive and detailed information about the problems and, above all, the user needs. However, especially with usability tests it can often be observed that they are only used when prototypes are already very mature. These are then often heavyweight tests in which everything is to be checked with as many participants as possible. The late timing of the tests leads to the fact that resulting adaptations involve high development efforts, since the majority of the application has already been implemented. Changes to concepts, on the other hand, are less complex. Especially in pure screen-based testing, where the user needs are left out, it can happen that the development has to be started almost from scratch. A complete misalignment of the application with the right user-needs should not occur at all. Companies are therefore faced with a whole range of challenges if the user is not to be left out in UX.
In this article, I would like to show how we solve these challenges and involve potential users early on in the project using various test methods, in order to create a basis for further development.