Topics
Topics
Over Messaging the User Experience
Alert: Are you sure you want to proceed? In his seminal book, The Humane Interface, the late Jef Raskin, one of the original Apple Designers, described inefficient interfaces as those that required user input but provided nothing in return. He provided as an example a Mac dialogue box from over 12 years ago (shown below)
What Statistical Test do I Use?
What do you think the most common question in statistics is? Several times a year I teach a statistics course for UX professionals and get asked this question a lot. We’re offering the class this fall at the LeanUX Denver conference and a portion of it is available for download. Some attendees have had statistics
Search vs. Browse on Websites
If they can find it they will buy it. But how will they find it? One of the pillars of a usable website experience is findability. Many users come to a website in search of something specific, whether it is a product or information: an iPhone Case, carry-on luggage, Miles Per Gallon for a Hyundai
Are Men Overconfident Users?
There are some interesting known differences between men and women in the psychological literature. For example, women tend to be better judges of emotion when looking at faces for just 0.2 of a second[pdf]! And across many measures of ability, while both men and women tend to exhibit overconfidence, men are generally more overconfident than
Report Usability Issues in a User by Problem Matrix
A lot happens when you observe a user during a usability test. There’s the interface, the utterances, the body language and the metrics. This rich experience can result in a long list of usability issues. Issues can range from cosmetic (a user finds the type in ALL CAPS a bit much) to catastrophic (data loss),
10 Things to Know about the Single Usability Metric (SUM)
There is no usability thermometer to tell you how easy to use a website or software application is. Instead we rely on the outcomes of good and bad experiences which provide evidence for the construct of usability. Combining multiple usability metrics into a single usability metric (SUM) is something we proposed seven years ago[PDF] and
Measuring the Customer Experience: Questions and Answers
This week I was invited to share my thoughts on challenges and insights into measuring the customer and user experience during a live chat on Twitter hosted by the folks at Vivisimo. We had 904 tweets which generated 2,304,670 impressions, reaching an audience of 311,413 followers. Here’s a bit of what we discussed. Isn’t revenue
Measuring Errors in the User Experience
Errors happen and unintended actions are inevitable. They are a common occurrence in usability tests and are the result of problems in an interface and imperfect human actions. It is valuable to have some idea about what these are, how frequently they occur, and how severe their impact is. First, what is an error? Slips
5 Valuable Skills for UX Professionals
The background, education and skills of professionals in User Experience are diverse. Regardless of whether you’re more on the research side or more on the design side of the User Experience, here are five skills that will make you more valuable and effective in your job. 1. Coding No you’re not a developer, you probably
How to Conduct a Usability Test on a Mobile Device
When it comes to testing websites there are many unmoderated and moderated solutions. But if you’ve ever tried to evaluate an app or website on a mobile phone or tablet there are fewer options. Usertesting.com offers a new mobile testing service which recruits users and records their mobile devices while they interact with your app
10 Things to Know About Net Promoter Scores and the User Experience
Increasingly companies are adopting the Net Promoter Score as the corporate metric. In many companies, all metrics, including user experience metrics, should roll up to the Net Promoter Score. Here are 10 things to know about the Net Promoter Score if you’re concerned about improving the user experience. The Net Promoter Score is a measure
6 Proportions to Compare when Improving the User Experience
One of the simplest ways to measure any event is a binary metric coded as a 1 or 0. Such a metric represents the presence or absence of just about anything of interest: Yes/ No, Pass/ Fail, Purchase/No Purchase, On/Off. Fundamentally the binary system is at the heart of computing as we know it. It