How to Move Toward a Dedicated Usability Testing Budget

One of the biggest challenges a development shop needs to overcome in embracing user-centered design is dedicating a budget toward it.  According to Jakob Nielsen's UX maturity model, they encounter budget hurdles at 2 main junctures:

  • Spending money on UX activities at all
  • Hiring a team (eventually a department) of people who specialize in UX

Development shops may experience strong resistance if they try to move from a posture of just building what their clients want, to spending money on usability studies to validate their works in progress.  In this guest post for Speckyboy, I describe the following:

  • Ways to start running usability studies on a low (or zero) budget
  • Approaches for dedicating a budget for regular usability studies