It was another busy year on MeasuringU.com with 50 new articles, the release of the 2nd editions of two books, UX Bootcamps in Denver and Rome and talks in London and Chicago.
In 2016, our articles were served up to over a million visitors. Thank You!
We covered topics including: usability testing, measurement and research methods, statistics, best practices with surveys, data analysis and visualizations. Here’s a summary of the articles I wrote in 2016.
Usability Testing & User Experience
We covered the essentials of measuring usability, including ways to use the System Usability Scale, how improving website navigation pays off and even ways to better quantify eye-tracking data.
Benchmarking is a key part of a plan to improve the user experience and helps determine if design changes improved the experience. We provided a checklist to help make the benchmarking process smoother, as well as noted 5 common mistakes to avoid.
As the mobile experience continues to evolve, we revisited 15 mobile UX facts and insights. We looked inside the usability lab including the origins and evolution of thinking loud, different facilitation styles and even the merits of the famous one-way mirror.
Finding and fixing usability problems is the cornerstone of usability testing and we provided seven ways for helping uncover usability problems, assigning severity ratings and steps for conducting an effective expert review.
Surveys & Measurement
Surveys are a cost-effective way for collecting data about the customer experience. Not all surveys are created equal and we described seven types. They often include some measure of customer satisfaction and standardized questionnaires, which should generally remain unchanged unless there are good reasons. Many attitudinal measures are often heavily affected by participant’s brand attitudes which often need to be accounted for to properly interpret the data.
While we want higher participation rates from surveys, there are pros and cons of requiring survey responses, offering incentives and branding the survey with your company’s name. Good question writing can help minimize response biases.
Statistics & Research Methods
At MeasuringU we try and make statistics more approachable to researchers and provided six best practices for using numbers to inform design, five steps for getting started with statistics and some ways to improve the success of your research.
For more advanced researchers we discussed ways to handle multiple comparisons, working with the odds ratio, latent variables and a key-drivers analysis. Sample size questions are perennial and we discussed five steps for better customer sampling and getting started finding the right sample size.
UX research tells you things that Google Analytics doesn’t. There’s a plethora of methods for understanding your users, including contextual inquiries and affinity diagramming. Many methods benefit from aggregating the judgement of multiple researchers.
UX and CX have a lot in common including principles to help innovate and improve an experience.
Data Analysis & Visualization
Analyzing data is a core function of UX measurement and we discussed how being approximately right is better than being exactly wrong, as well as managing the inevitable false positives. We revisited some somewhat controversial topics, such as whether the Net Promoter Score is a percentage and if you can take the mean of ordinal data (both are minor concerns in my opinion). We provided some essential and advanced skills for using Excel and the merits of graphing difference versus raw scores and whether all graphs should really start at 0.
Visualizing data can help with interpretation and communication. We discussed five Visualization techniques for managing the customer experience and ways for visualizing statistical significance.
We’ll see you in 2017 where we have plenty of new articles planned for better measuring and managing the user experience.
