Blogs

Should you ask what people think? Are thoughts and feelings reliable indicators of future behavior? Asking about people’s attitudes—especially about their intentions (likelihood to use, recommend, or purchase)—gets a bad rap in UX research. There’s a sort of folk wisdom in User Experience research: People are poor predictors of their future behavior. And this distrust in what people think is rooted in some well-cited articles.

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You’ve probably heard of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment by Philip Zimbardo (especially if you took an intro psych class). The shocking results had similar implications to the notorious Milgram experiment and suggested our roles may be a major cause for past atrocities and injustices. You might have also heard about research from Cornell University that found, across multiple studies, that simply having larger serving plates make

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The Net Promoter Score introduced a new language of loyalty. At center stage are the promoters and detractors. These designations are given to respondents who answer the How Likely Are You to Recommend (LTR) question as shown below. But what is the justification for the designations? Were they just arbitrarily created? Do they just sound good for executives? How much faith should we put in

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Online dating websites are one of the primary ways people find dates and even future spouses. These sites represent the bulk of a 3 billion dollar dating services industry. In fact, around 30% of recent marriages started online, but it’s not like finding a date is as easy as filtering choices on Amazon and having them delivered via drone the next day (not yet at

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No one likes getting lost. In real life or digitally. One can get lost searching for a product to purchase, finding medical information, or clicking through a mobile app to post a social media status. Each link, button, and menu leads to decisions. And each decision can result in a mistake, leading to wasted time, frustration, and often the inability to accomplish tasks. But how

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A usable product is a better product. But even the most usable product isn’t adequate if it doesn’t do what it needs to. Products, software, websites, and apps need to be both usable and useful for people to “accept” them, both in their personal and professional lives. That’s the idea behind the influential Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Here are 10 things to know about the TAM.

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The hold music. The wait time. The menu that always seems to have just changed. Calling customer service is not usually what people want to do in their spare time. But it’s often necessary and represents an important touchpoint for companies that interact with their customers. Understanding why people call customer support is also a good place to start identifying problems in the user experience

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How much did you spend on Amazon last week? If you had to provide receipts or proof of purchases, how accurate do you think your estimate would be? In an earlier article we reported on the first wave of findings for a UX longitudinal study. We found that attitudes toward the website user experience tended to predict future purchasing behavior. In general, customers of websites

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Watching how people interact with an interface tells you a lot about what works and what needs improvement. And while observing behavior is essential for understanding the user experience, it’s not enough. Just because a product does what it should, is priced right, and is reliable, doesn’t mean it provides a good user experience. Users can think the experience is too complicated or difficult. For

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UX attitudes can be associated with future website behaviors. We described how to create this linkage in an earlier article that described the results of an exploratory longitudinal study. In that article, we discussed the common challenges involved with linking attitudes to behaviors. Notably, attitudes about a general concept (user experience) can have difficulty predicting specific behaviors (future purchases). Often the lack of relationship between attitudes

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