Blogs

This Valentine’s Day around $2 billion will be spent on flowers. A lot of that ordering will be online. Poor online experiences mean shoppers will abandon an order and go somewhere else, or not return when they need to purchase flowers again. Having a strong user experience will ensure customers can find the right arrangement, for the right price, and have the flowers delivered fresh

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UX research efforts should be driven by business questions and a good hypothesis. Whether the research is a usability evaluation (unmoderated or moderated), survey, or an observational method like a contextual inquiry, decisions need to be made about question wording, response options, and tasks. But in the process of working through study details, often the original intent of the study can get lost. At its

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It’s the only number a company needs to grow. Or at least that’s what was proclaimed in the title of the now famous HBR article that helped popularize the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Lately it's been taking on more criticism. The NPS is compelling to executives because of its simplicity and for what it purports to do: be the one number a company should track

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While UX research may be a priority for you, it probably isn’t for your participants. And participants are a pretty important ingredient in usability testing. If people were predictable, reliable, and always did what they said, few of us would make a living in improving the user experience! Unfortunately, people don’t always show up when they say they will for your usability test, in-depth interview,

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Benchmarking is an essential part of a plan to systematically improve the user experience. A regular benchmark study is a great way to show how design improvements may or may not be improving the user experience of websites and products. After you’ve decided you’re ready to conduct a benchmark, you’ll need to consider whether to conduct it internally within your company or outsource all or

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As the world continues to go mobile, there’s a huge demand for both mobile devices and cellular plans from mobile carriers. A lot of that buying happens online. Having a good online experience for wireless carriers ensures customers select the right device and plan. If customers can’t find the right device or have questions about the already complicated plans, they need to visit a store,

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It was another busy year on MeasuringU.com with 50 new articles, a new website, a new unmoderated research platform (MUIQ), and our 5th UX Bootcamp. In 2017 over 1.2 million people viewed our articles. Thank You! The most common topics we covered include: usability testing, benchmarking, the 3Ms of methods, metrics and measurement, and working with online panels. Here’s a summary of the articles I

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A good measure of customer loyalty should be valid, reliable, and sensitive to changes in customer attitudes. For the most part, the Net Promoter Score achieves this (although it does have its drawbacks). One area the Net Promoter Score lacks in is how its scoring approach adds “noise” to the customer loyalty signal. The process of subtracting detectors from promoters may be “executive friendly” but

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To understand problems on a website, nothing quite beats watching users. The process provides a wealth of information both about what users can or can’t do and what might be causing problems in an interface. The major drawback to watching users live or recordings of sessions is that it takes a lot of focused time. 5 to 20 participants—the typical sample size in moderated studies—isn’t

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Benchmarking is an essential step in making quantitative improvements to the user experience of a website, app, or product. In an earlier article and course, I discussed the benefits of regularly benchmarking and it's the topic of my forthcoming book. While technology platforms like MUIQ have made unmoderated benchmarks popular, moderated benchmarks are still essential for benchmarking physical products, and desktop and enterprise software. It

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