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Diagnosing Interaction Problems With Cause And Effect Diagrams

It’s good to think positively, but sometimes, negative thinking can solve problems more effectively. There’s no shortage of problems on websites and software. Many of them are interaction problems. Users can’t login Visitors can’t find the products in the navigation Customers are calling support Sales are low Conversion rate are down Fixing Symptoms not Problems

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Six Controversial Topics In Usability

Every field has its set of hot-button issues and usability is no exception. Here are six topics that tend to generate some passionate discussions. 1.    Quantifying usability: Usability is all about the user (i.e. people). Talk of using numbers to describe human computer interaction gets some upset. Usability is typically considered a qualitative activity and

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What Is A Good Task-Completion Rate?

It depends (you saw that coming). Context matters in deciding what a good completion rate is for a task, however, knowing what other task completion rates are can be a good guide for setting goals. An analysis of almost 1200 usability tasks shows that the average task-completion rate is 78%. The Fundamental Usability Metric A

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How well can users predict task-level usability?

Ask a user to complete a task and they can tell you how difficult it was to complete. But can a user tell you how difficult the task will be without even attempting it? It turns out the task description reveals much of the task’s complexity, so users can predict actual task ease and difficulty

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Usability As A Key Driver Of Revenue

Many companies understand the importance of user centered design in theory. Few can track how money invested in improving the user experience translates into profitability. By quantifying design efforts and outcomes all organizations can benefit from understanding how improving the user experience can improve revenue. The Engine of Growth If you can imagine revenue being

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8 Ways To Show Design Changes Improved The User Experience

A lot of effort goes into simplifying interactions, reducing bugs and enhancing features. While these changes may be obvious to some, they can be taken for granted by others (especially those in charge of budgets). It is valuable to document both the effort that goes into improving the user experience and the result of all

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How To Quantify Comments

Just because customer information is qualitative doesn’t mean you can’t use some quantitative methods to help interpret and prioritize your findings. Quantifying the frequency of comments with a confidence interval helps you estimate a sentiment in the total user population. Analyzing and prioritizing comments is a common task for the user researcher. Open ended comments

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10 Tips For Benchmark Usability Tests

How usable is a website or software application? To know if design changes improved the usability of an application, you first need a baseline measure of usability from a benchmark test. Here are 10 tips to use when planning your next benchmark test. Recruit for representativeness over randomness: It will be difficult to select a

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How Many Customers Should You Observe?

Timing, luck and perseverance all play a role in making a successful product. But so does observing and understanding your customers’ problems. The number of customers you need to observe will depend on how common customer behaviors are and how certain you need to be. Building a successful product means building something that customers want

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Measuring Usability with the System Usability Scale (SUS)

It is the 25th anniversary of the creation of the most used questionnaire for measuring perceptions of usability. The System Usability Scale (SUS) was released into this world by John Brooke in 1986. It was originally created as a “quick and dirty” scale for administering after usability tests on systems like VT100 Terminal (“Green-Screen”) applications.

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Are Net Promoter Scores Normally Distributed?

Responses to rating-scale data typically don’t follow a normal distribution. However, this is unlikely to affect the accuracy of statistical calculations because the distribution of error in the measurement is normally distributed. Top-box scoring of rating-scale data can provide an easy way to summarize or segment your data in the absence of a benchmark or

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Does Prior Experience Affect Perceptions Of Usability?

Are attitudes about usability constant? If we think something is unusable today, will we think it’s unusable tomorrow, next week or next year? How much does prior experience affect how usable we think a websites or software is? Enough to pay attention to. In a recent assessment, prior experience boosted usability ratings 11% for websites

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