haydee
Chicago, IL:: myhaydee@hotmail.com

Jakob Nielsen has been a long-time proponent of smaller, cheaper usability studies for projects with small budgets. He coined this approach "discount" usability engineering.

I have applied Nielsen's "discount" thinking to Information Architecture. Just because I have a small budget does not mean that I need to foresake user research or testing. Instead I scale the IA work to fit the budget so that my clients receive comprehensive services instead of a limited perspective.

Example:
I was charged with developing a web-based application which manages customer data and history. Lack of time and money prevented the client from conducting a full-scale user research project to determine how and when its employees interacted with this data. Rather than designing an application without any user research, I personally contacted employees and asked them whether I could spend a few hours just watching them interact with customers. They agreed and just that few hours of observation gave me enough background to recognize some of the essential functionality my application would need to provide.