Topics
Topics
8 Ways to Identify Unmet Customer Needs
Innovation can’t be legislated. It can’t be bought. Where does it come from? Innovation comes from identifying customers’ needs and meeting them. Easy to understand. Hard to do. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Intuit understand this–and they’re doing it. Uber’s success, for example, has come not from building new, better taxis but from seeing–and then
The New Face of Usability Testing
How are you reading this page? Are you at work? At home? Are you checking your phone or email as you read? Are you eating? Are pets or family members nearby? Although we rarely interact with websites or software in isolation, without distractions, for decades when we spoke of usability testing, we pictured a quiet
7 Techniques for Prioritizing Customer Requirements
Too much to do and too little time (and money). If you’re introducing or improving a product or website, you probably have an impossibly long list of features you’d like to fix, improve, or add. Prioritizing this list is essential to the success of your product and potentially business. But what’s the best way to
How to Compute a Confidence Interval in 5 Easy Steps
Confidence intervals are your frenemies. They are one of the most useful statistical techniques you can apply to customer data. At the same time they can be perplexing and cumbersome. But confidence intervals provide an essential understanding of how much faith we can have in our sample estimates, from any sample size, from 2 to
The Experiment Requires That You Continue: On The Ethical Treatment of Users
In 1963 Yale Psychologist Stanley Milgram paid volunteers $4 to “teach” another volunteer, called the “learner” new vocabulary words. If the learner got the words wrong, he or she received an electric shock! Or, so the teacher/volunteer was led to believe. In fact, no shock was given, instead a person working with Milgram pretended, with
28 Resources for Getting Started In UX
The field of user experience encompasses a wide array of individual jobs including designers, researchers, information architects and product developers. It has received attention lately for being both one of the fastest growing job sectors and notoriously difficulty to recruit qualified candidates for. If you’re interested in breaking into the field, or just want to
What To Do When You Can’t Run a Usability Test
In an ideal world, users would be involved in every stage of product development, including requirements gathering, iterative prototype testing and post release testing. However, there are a lot of reasons why testing with users doesn’t happen. Among the most common are: Time: Running moderated test sessions takes time to plan and conduct. A developer,
10 Methods To Improve the Customer Experience
There are some good metrics to collect and a lot to keep track of when measuring, managing and improving the customer experience. Here are 10 methods we use to improve the customer’s experience on websites, mobile apps, software and hardware. True Intent/ Voice of Customer Study : You can be a successful company for quite
Should the Net Promoter Score Go? 5 Common Criticisms Examined
It seems that the pendulum has started to swing against the Net Promoter Score. Three years ago, I often heard how everything in a company mattered only as long as it contributed to a better Net Promoter Score. This new metric that the management had just bought into was how everything was measured, including employee
5 Variables to Manage in a Comparative Usability Study
Which product is the most usable? One of the primary goals of a comparative study is to understand which product or website performs the best or worst on usability metrics such as completion rates or perceptions of usability. Comparisons can be made between competitive products or alternate design concepts. When conducting a comparative usability study,
Getting Revenue From Unhappy Customers
How does it feel to pay the check at the restaurant where you had terrible service and bad food? Or how do you feel when you pay your cable bill each month? And how about paying $150 to change your airline ticket reservation? In all cases, the companies get your money. It’s revenue in their
10 Customer Metrics You Should Collect
There are a number of ways to quantify the value of your customers throughout the customer journey. While the “best” metrics depend on your goals and specific context, here is a list of 10 that most organizations should collect. They include a mix of the four types of customer analytics to collect: descriptive, behavioral, interaction