You know it’s a lie as soon as you hear it – “Of course we care about the user experience. We do user acceptance training on everything!” So the product or site is already developed, there’s no real place for user input except as notes for possible incorporation in future versions, as long as they’re just add-ons, not actual changes. If you’re lucky the run the product through a focus group “Don’t you love this? How would you use it?” If you’re very lucky they actually let some users from the beta group use the site. If the stars are in their proper alignment and luck is raining down on you, they use a few naive users in the identified target market to actually test the product in the intended tasks.
Probably a couple people from management and the marketing department and other stakeholders use it for a while and decide that it’s exactly what they spec’d and it seems really pretty to them.
User Acceptance Testing is usually the opposite of User Experience Strategy.
ktalbers
