Wizard of Oz
Why?
A Wizard of Oz: acting out the systems functionality, can help when a system has not been build yet, but a realistic user test is necessary to drive design.
How?
In a Wizard of Oz study the user is made to believe he works with the real system, while in practice someone 'behind the screen' controls the system behaviours. Sometimes temporary software is build to avoid the user detecting the simulation.
Ingrediënts
- Experimenters ought to have seen the movie...
- A separate room for the “wizard” where he can control the system.
- A believable story for the users.
In practice
The Wizard of Oz technique is popular in Service Design projects, although the requirement that the user should not know he is not using the real system is sometimes dropped. This brings the technique close to role-play though.
- Universal Methods of Design (Hanington & Martin, 2012). Spends a couple of pages about the Wizard of Oz technique. In the Dutch version chapter 99. P205-205
- Depending on your goals a good background read can be Chapter 11 of Observing the User Experience on usability testing in general (p273-326) or chapter 9 of Researching Information Systems and Computing (Oates, 2006) on experimental design p126-140