Topics
Topics
Measuring User Confidence in Usability Tests
Are you sure you did that right? When we put the effort into making a purchase online, finding information or attempting tasks in software, we want to know we’re doing things right. Having confidence in our actions and the outcomes is an important part of the user experience. That’s why we ask users how confident
10 Things to Know About the System Usability Scale (SUS)
The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a ten-item questionnaire administered to users for measuring the perceived ease of use of software, hardware, cell phones and websites. It’s been around for more than a quarter century, and its wide usage has allowed us to study it extensively and write about it in this blog and in
Measuring The Visual Appeal of Websites
Is a beautiful website more usable? Psychological literature has discussed, for some time, the “what is beautiful is good” phenomenon. That is, we ascribe positive attributes to things that are more attractive. This applies to people and likely to products and websites, as well. But does that positive halo also carry over to our impressions
Associating UX Changes to the Net Promoter Score
A bad experience will impact how likely users are to recommend a website or product to a friend. Fixing those bad experiences is critical to increasing positive word of mouth. Unfortunately, there are usually too many things to fix and just as many opinions on what should be fixed. Development teams need to prioritize. An
7 Ways to Find Users for Usability Testing
You need users in order to do usability testing. It can be a small scale do-it-yourself usability test or a large sample corporate usability test but finding available users can be a burden. It’s often cited as one of the reasons usability testing isn’t done more often. The process by which you find your users
10 Metrics for Testing Website Navigation
Website navigation is at the heart of good findability. To measure findability, we perform a tree test or a click test on a live website. In both types of studies, we collect many metrics to help uncover problems with terms and taxonomy. While the fundamental metric of findability is whether users find an item or
Five Techniques for Moderating Usability Tests
It doesn’t matter if it’s your first usability test or your hundredth; there are always things you can improve to make the most of the time with your users. Avoid using why in a direct, reflexive manner: We of course want to know why users do things on websites and in applications.But when we ask
Seven Ways to Test the Effectiveness of Icons
For as long as user interfaces have had icons, there have been strong opinions about what makes an effective icon. From the business analyst to the CEO, we all like to tell the designer what’s “intuitive” and what’s “terrible.” Instead of making decisions based on the pay grade of the people in a meeting, consider
Five User Research Mistakes To Avoid
There are a lot of mistakes that can be made when conducting any type of research. But almost all research contains some mistakes in methodology, measurement or interpretation. Rarely do the mistakes render the research useless. To help make your next user research endeavor more useful, here are five common mistakes to avoid. 1. Usability
The 3 R’s of Measuring Design Comprehension
Will users get it? Marketing and design teams often want to know if users will understand a key concept on a website or design. For example, do users understand new terms and conditions, a privacy policy, different product models, prices or the service packages properly? When you want to know if users will understand something
Seven Tips for Writing Usability Task Scenarios
The core idea behind usability testing is having real people trying to accomplish real tasks on software, websites, cell phones or hardware. Identifying what users are trying to do is a key first step. Once you know what tasks you want to test, you’ll want to create realistic task scenarios for participants to attempt. A
How To Measure Learnability
Learnability is often used interchangeably with usability. While they are similar concepts, learnability is actually something a bit different. Part of the confusion is that there are two common uses of the term learnability. The first use of learnability describes the ability of an interface to allow users to accomplish tasks on the first attempt.