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Memory Versus Math In Usability Tests

I write a lot about the importance of confidence intervals and making the most of small sample sizes. Recently, Dean Barker, director of UX at Sage CRM read one of the articles on margins of error and sample sizes and said: “I understand there is variability with small samples but I’m having a hard time

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Books Faster than Tablets…Or Not?

Recently Nielsen conducted a study on the reading speeds between the printed book, Kindle and iPad. From 24 users the study concluded that the iPad took about 6.2% longer (p =.06) and Kindle about 10% longer (p <.01) to read than the same story on a printed book. From this data Nielsen concluded “Books Faster

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A Brief History Of The Magic Number 5 In Usability Testing

Wondering about the origins of the sample size controversy in the usability profession?  Here is an annotated timeline of the major events and papers which continue to shape this topic. The Pre-Cambrian Era (Up to 1982) It’s the dawn of Usability Evaluation and the first indications of diminishing returns in problem discovery are emerging. 1981:

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What is a Representative Sample Size for a Survey?

Will users purchase an upgrade? What features are most desired?  Will they recommend the product to a friend? Part of measuring the user experience involves directly asking users what they think via surveys. The Web has made surveys easy to administer and deliver. It hasn’t made the question of how many people you need to

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The Five Most Influential Papers In Usability

I compiled a list of papers that have had a large and lasting influence on the field of Usability and User Experience. I then asked Jim Lewis and Joe Dumas, two pioneers in this field for their top five.  There was considerable overlap in both the papers and topics suggesting that while there may be

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Want To Improve Usability? Count Calories

When babies are born in the hospital nurses measure every feeding and diaper change. When you want to lose weight with Weight Watchers you log everything you eat using a point system. When you want to improve usability beyond obvious problems you need to record: symptoms:  lower completion rates, lower satisfaction ratings, longer task times

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Five Ways To Make Any Usability Test More Credible

Whether you’re conducting an early stage test of a prototype or late validation, these five tips can make any usability test more credible. The tips both temper skepticism about small samples and help you avoid overstating your findings. Count the number of users that experience each problem. Early testing is all about finding and fixing

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What Five Users Can Tell You That 5000 Cannot

With usability testing it used to be that we had to make our best guess as how users actually interacted with software outside a contrived lab-setting. We didn’t have all the information we needed. Knowing what users did was in a sense a puzzle with a lot of missing pieces. Web-analytics provides us with a

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Is Usability A Science?

Is manufacturing a science? Is marketing a science? Is engineering a science? None of these are sciences. But they all can be informed by science or ignore science. To be “scientific” is to rely on observation and measurement instead of intuition and superstition.  Controlled experiments, surveys, observational studies, testing and validation can be used in

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User Experience BS Generator

It’s been ten years since the dot-com flame-out began. In those ten years we’ve seen the rise of User Experience. User Experience seems to have a lot of buzz and gets attached to all sorts of activities that have little to do with the user or the experience. It has all but replaced the terms

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The Faces In The Crowdsourcing

Who would toil away for pennies, completing trivial tasks and answering surveys? A quarter-million users registered with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service.  Just who exactly are the people behind the Mechanical Turk and can we rely on the data we get from the nameless faceless masses ?  In this blog posted on Oracle.com I review two

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iPhone vs. Desktop: Which is Faster?

If you have an iPhone, you probably love it like I do. You probably also use it a lot like I do. The features and apps and, of course, the user interface make using the iPhone a rich and rewarding experience.  Where I once had to wait till I got to my computer to send

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