What does it take to become a senior UX researcher? An advanced degree? Particular experience and skills, like the number of moderated studies conducted or a variety of methods employed? While all those play a role, the type of job (in-house small-team, in-house large-team, solo researcher, or agency) can affect what you are exposed to.
UX researchers use a lot of rating scales. We recommend using standardized rating scales when possible. One of the benefits of some standardized scales, such as the SUS, SUPR-Q®, and UX-Lite®, is that you have a reference database of historical data. But there’s not always a standardized questionnaire for everything you’re hoping to measure, so
One of the hardest parts of conducting user and market research is recruiting participants. It takes time, costs money, and on top of that, there are no-shows and fraudsters. Now imagine being able to conduct UX research without the hassle of recruiting the “U.” Enter the idea of AI-generated synthetic users that offer the promise
What’s the value of a degree? While most discussions on the cost and value of a university education focus on the undergraduate degree, getting a bachelor’s degree isn’t really a question that’s asked in the UX world. Almost all UX professionals (93%–97%) surveyed over the last decade have at least a bachelor’s degree, suggesting that
Clutter distracts and detracts from a good user experience. A cluttered website makes it hard to find information. Clutter gets in the way of completing tasks. At least that’s what we think about clutter. But is there quantifiable evidence that a cluttered design degrades a website’s user experience? To answer that question, you need a
In math class, we spend a lot of time learning fractions because they are so important in everyday life (e.g., budgeting, purchasing at the grocery store). Fractions are also used extensively in UX research (e.g., the fundamental completion rate is a fraction), typically expressed as percentages or proportions. Unfortunately, fractions are also hard to learn,
How hard is it to figure out the total cost of a mobile phone service plan? Have you had trouble finding the customer support number for your cable provider? How do you quantify these experiences? What words would you use to describe them? While we have ways of measuring perceived ease using numeric scales, rating
UX research is geared primarily toward understanding how to improve the experience of products, websites, and software. The intent is not to assess people but to use people to assess product experiences. But people’s ability to solve technical problems—what we often loosely refer to as tech savviness—can confound our research findings. That is, including only
How do we know what a good measure is? We have written extensively about the benefits of using standardized measures such as questionnaires to measure the user experience. We have also written about the processes and methods used to build a standardized questionnaire. But where do these methods come from? Are they the best ones?
Think Aloud (TA) usability testing is a popular UX research method. Having participants speak their thoughts as they attempt tasks helps researchers understand possible sources of misunderstandings so they can identify and potentially fix problems. The signature method of having users think aloud can trace its roots back to psychoanalysis and work from Freud (psychoanalysis),
