Topics
Topics
What Goes into a Usability Test Plan?
Failing to plan is planning to fail. It’s both good practice and often necessary to have a test plan before beginning a usability test. Like any plan, it should not only lay out the framework of the study, but also help identify problems with the methodology, metrics or tasks while something can still be done
6 Steps to Identifying Usability Problems
While humans are error prone, many of the unintended actions, delays, frustrations and confusions come from interfaces: Pushing instead of pulling a door Not being able to set the time on a clock Unintentionally voting for the wrong candidate on a ballot Turning on the wrong burner on a stove Not understanding an error message
How to Conduct a Top Task Analysis
Who are the users and what are they trying to do? Answering those two questions are essential first steps to measuring and improving the right things on an interface. It’s also one of the first things we’ll cover at the Denver UX Boot Camp. While there are hundreds to thousands of things users can accomplish
Measuring Usability ROI for Government Websites
On most commercial websites, success is counted through increased traffic, increased conversion rates and increased revenue. If you can associate design changes to one of these key metrics, you can understand the return on investment for UX efforts. Even if you can’t associate changes directly to conversions or revenue, metrics like the Net Promoter Score
Measuring the Effectiveness of a Product Name
Naming a product is like naming a baby. Everyone has opinions and you are stuck with it for a long time! Product naming, whether it is for software, hardware or a physical device is a multistage process—often involving creative teams, product managers, CEOs and lawyers. It’s also one of the few times I think focus
17 Periodicals for Usability Research
If you’ve ever wondered whether there’s research to help guide a design or inform product development, then you’ll likely want to look to the published literature. Despite the vast power of the internet and search engines, it’s still surprisingly difficult to know where to look to find relevant, peer-reviewed research. A simple Google search will
Best Practices for Using Statistics on Small Sample Sizes
Some people think that if you have a small sample size you can’t use statistics. Put simply, this is wrong, but it’s a common misconception. There are appropriate statistical methods to deal with small sample sizes. Although one researcher’s “small” is another’s large, when I refer to small sample sizes I mean studies that have
7 Steps to Conducting Better Qualitative Research
Qualitative research is often used as a catch-all phrase to mean not to expect any “hard numbers” from research findings. While qualitative research is the collection and analysis of primarily non-numerical activities (words, pictures and actions), it doesn’t mean you can’t apply a structured approach to your research efforts. Usability testing is often characterized as
Rating the Severity of Usability Problems
If only one out of 1000 users encounters a problem with a website, then it’s a minor problem. If that sentence bothered you, it should. It could be that that single problem resulted in one visitor’s financial information inadvertently being posted to the website for the world to see. Or it could be a slight
Measuring Website Visitors’ True Intent
Who are your users and what are they doing? Measuring the user experience starts with understanding who your users are and what tasks they are trying to accomplish on your website. It’s one of the first things we’ll cover at the UX Boot Camp. Visitor profile and intent are not something you can derive easily
20 Resources for Evaluating Website Navigation
Navigation is at the heart of the user experience for websites, software and mobile apps. Despite improvements in search, most users still rely on browsing as a strategy to find information or accomplish tasks. Designing and evaluating navigation is an essential part of making a better user experience. We’ll cover evaluating navigation in detail at
How to Benchmark Website Usability
How usable is a website? While most usability activities involve finding and fixing problems on websites (often called formative evaluations), it’s good practice to know how usable a website is (often called a summative evaluation). Obtaining a quantitative usability benchmark allows you to understand how design and functional changes impacted the user experience. We will