Topics
Topics
Usability & Net Promoter Benchmarks for Health Insurance Websites
Signing up for health insurance might have been a nightmare for many, but managing your health insurance once you get it, it turns out, isn’t that easy either. In conjunction with our panel partner, Op4G, we asked five hundred participants to reflect on their most recent experience with their health insurance provider’s website. In total,
The Top 10 UX Articles of 2013
It was a great year on MeasuringUsability.com. We featured both primary research and relevant research published in peer reviewed journals and websites. Our articles were served-up 2.2. million times to 895k visitors in 2013. Here are the ten articles that received many of those page views (in descending order). Using Card Sorting To Test Information
5 Reasons You Should and Should Not Test With 5 Users
There are a lot of misconceptions about when it is and when it is not appropriate to test with five users. There’s no reason to take an extreme position on this issue and think it’s never acceptable or always the right number. Instead you should understand what you can and cannot learn from just a
The Importance of the First Choice in Website Navigation
How important is the first choice users make when navigating a website? Turns out it’s even more important than we thought. Between 2007 and 2009, Bob Bailey and researchers examined how important the first click was in determining the ultimate success of a task. Across a dozen studies, they found an interesting result: if a
How Smartphone Usage Changes Over Time and By Income Group
What would happen if you gave a few dozen people a free iPhone AND cell service for one year and then monitored their usage? This isn’t some story about the NSA, instead, it’s longitudinal research that was actually conducted at Rice University and reported last year [pdf]. Much of the data we have on mobile
Timeline of Usability Infographic
We’ve put together a visual timeline of the 100 year history of usability that we detailed in an earlier blog. This detailed infographic covers many of the key events, publications and people that have shaped the profession. If you’re obsessed with usability like we are, you can also purchase a 52 inch full-color version and
Usability 101 Quiz
The quarter just ended for a graduate level class I taught on Usability at the University of Denver. Here are eleven questions I wanted to be sure everyone in the class could answer and understand. See how well you can answer some questions on the core concepts of usability, with an emphasis on usability evaluation.
5 Tips for Applying Lean UX to User Research
Focus on decisions and not deliverables. It’s one of the main concepts around Lean thinking in general, and Lean UX in particular. Focus on the end user experience and not the pile of intermediary deliverables. Bloated test plans, power point presentations, pixel-perfect concepts and all the clutter that comes from assembling a team to develop
Are Severe Problems Uncovered Earlier in Usability Tests?
After I conducted my first usability test in the 1990’s I was struck by two things: Just how many usability problems are uncovered and how some problems repeat after observing just a few users. In almost every usability test I’ve conducted since then I’ve continued to see this pattern. Even after running 5 to 10
Designing for Usability: 3 Key Principles
It’s not terribly complicated, yet it’s not universally applied. When designing an application, website or product, three things help generate a more usable experience: an early focus on the users and tasks, empirical measurement, and iterative design. These three key principles were articulated by John Gould and Clayton Lewis almost 30 years ago in the
4 Experiment Types for User Research
Which design will improve the user experience? One of the primary goals of conducting user research is to establish some causal relationship between a design and a behavior. Typically, we want to see if a design element or changes to an interface lead to a more usable experience (experiment) or if more desirable outcomes are
UX Methods Infographic
There are a lot of methods to use to improve the user experience. We detailed many of them in an earlier blog. We know many of you are visual learners so we created an infographic of when to use which UX method. To help evangelize these methods and approaches we created a high resolution two-sided