Blogs

Your car doesn’t start on some mornings. Your computer crashes at the worst times. Your friend doesn’t show up to your dinner party. If something or someone isn’t reliable, it’s not only a pain but it makes your life less effective and less efficient. And what is true for people and products is true for measurement. The wording of items and the response options we

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Where do you get your news? Do you think it’s objective? Do you trust it? Fewer people are relying on print (newspapers and magazines) and even TV for their news. Print subscriptions continue to decline and almost half of Americans report getting their news online, nearly the same as TV news. Despite the evolution of the news “interface” from print and TV to digital, many of

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A lot of UX methods exist along with recommendations on when to use them. Some activities tend to cross methods: from operationalizing research questions, making data collection more efficient, and making the most of both what users say and what they do. Here are five techniques we’ve found that make our UX research more effective (and often more efficient). 1. Use a Research Matrix To ensure a

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UX metrics are a mix of attitude (what people think) and actions (what people do). To fully measure the user experience, you need to measure both. UX metrics are influenced by more than an interface. Users have preconceived notions about companies and this affects both how they think and what they do when they interact with a brand—either in a store or online. Brand attitudes

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Uncovering usability problems is at the heart of usability testing. Problems and insights can be uncovered from observing participants live in a usability lab, using heuristic evaluations, or watching videos of participants. But if you change the person looking for the problems (the evaluator), do you get a different set of problems? The Evaluator Effect It’s been 20 years since two influential papers (Jacobsen, Hertzum,

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Who can see that photo you just posted on Facebook? What does the @ sign do on Twitter? Is my news feed manipulating me? Is it appropriate to post on political topics on LinkedIn? Social media is both heavily used and heavily discussed for its effect on society (for better or worse, including the recent media). A lot of money is made displaying ads and

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How satisfied are you with your life? How happy are you with your job or your marriage? Are you extroverted or introverted? It’s hard to capture the fickle nature of attitudes and constructs in any measure. It can be particularly hard to do that with just one question or item. Consequently, psychology, education, marketing, and user experience have a long history of recommending multiple items

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Finding and fixing usability problems in an interface leads to a better user experience. Beyond fixing problems with current functionality, participant behavior can also reveal important insights into needed new features. These problems and insights are often best gleaned from observing participants interacting with a website, app, or hardware device during actual use or simulated use (during a usability test). With the advent of remote testing platforms like

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Finding and fixing problems encountered by participants through usability testing generally leads to a better user experience. But not all participants are created equal. One of the major differentiating characteristics is prior experience. People with more experience tend to perform more tasks successfully, more quickly and generally have a more positive attitude about the experience than inexperienced people. But does testing with experienced users lead to uncovering

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Customer satisfaction is a staple of company measurement. It’s been used for decades to understand how customers feel about a product or experience. Poor satisfaction measures are an indication of unhappy customers, and unhappy customers generally won’t purchase again, leading to poor revenue growth. But is satisfaction the wrong measure for most companies? That’s certainly the claim Fred Reichheld has made and advocated the Net

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