At the risk of becoming an xkcd link blog (two re-blogs in one week), I had to post this comic in light of my recent musings regarding Consumer Values.

This comic does a great job of explaining why my opinions about mass consumer appeal of products and the importance of certain characteristics is completely bunk. :)

On a slightly related note, this comic actually touches on a crucial component of good user experience testing practices. When doing user testing you want the participant to speak their internal monologue thought process outloud. Speaking all thoughts aloud is incredibly unnatural for participants, and I have had to remind every participant I have ever tested to say more about what they are thinking. A great way to get around this issue is to test participants in pairs of two. Then, quite naturally without instruction, participants will speak their internal monologue because they are articulating it to their partner, just like the shopping teams of geeks in the cartoon above. I learned this technique from a guest lecture by Will Wright. It’s how they tested The Sims for “fun factor”, and it led to some brilliant discoveries that the designers would not have found otherwise.