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Five HCI Laws for User Experience Design

Usability is hardly physics or chemistry. But there are some important principles from decades of research in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) that apply to design and user research. Here are five famous laws that can be applied to improving the user experience of applications and websites: Miller’s Law of Short Term Memory Load: The psychologist

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5 Ways To Maximize Your Usability Testing Efforts

When conducting a usability test, gathering input on a design, or testing new features, we strongly recommend the 1:1 moderated session over group sessions. However, we usually aren’t convincing others to run 1:1 sessions. Instead, we spend more effort convincing others of combining the traditional in-person 1:1 session with other methods. We find we can

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6 Tools for Applying Six Sigma to the User Experience

Six Sigma is a methodology for improving the quality of everything from the manufacturing of minute electronic parts to the development of complex software. At its core, it has a set of tools that helps identify and eliminate defects, waste and undesirable outcomes. While there are many tools in the six sigma toolbox, here are

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A Brief History of Usability

The profession of usability as we know it largely started in the 1980s. Many methods have their roots in the earlier fields of Ergonomics and Human Factors which began near the beginning of the 20th century and had a strong influence through World War II. While not exhaustive, the following is a timeline of several

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Hypothesis Testing in the User Experience

The science project. It’s something we all have completed and if you have kids might see each year at the school science fair. Does an expensive baseball travel farther than a cheaper one? Which melts an ice block quicker, salt water or tap water? Does changing the amount of vinegar affect the color when dying

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15 Mobile UX Facts and Insights

Designing a better user experience means making sure that users can access information and services across multiple devices, especially mobile devices (phones and tablets). In building a better experience, there are many questions about mobile device usage and how designers can best meet users’ needs with apps and responsive designs. We’ve conducted a lot of

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Prioritizing Problems in the User Experience: The FMEA

Traveling is hard. Traveling with children is especially hard. A number of things can go wrong, making the trip difficult or even nonexistent. Some problems are nuisances (sick and/or hungry kids, delayed flights, or the wrong sized rental car), while other problems will lead to failure, which in this case means not reaching your destination

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The Value of Measuring Poor User Experiences

When we have a good experience with a service or product, we enjoy it, tell our friends, and will probably use that service or product again. But when we have a frustrating or poor experience, such as the occurrence of message boxes relentlessly popping up during sporting events, we hate the product, tell our friends

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Prioritizing UI Improvements: The QFD

Too much to do and too little time—that’s product design. The list of bug fixes, feature requests, pet projects and product enhancements are almost always too long to address. While the product can be a website, desktop software or an enterprise accounting system, it’s a problem that predates software development and is as old as

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The 10 Most Popular UX Articles from 2012

2012 was a busy year for us at Measuring Usability LLC. We worked with dozens of great clients on many interesting projects. We hosted the successful Lean UX Denver conference and released two books. We doubled our office space and welcomed three new analysts to the team. On MeasuringUsability.com our servers saw 596k visitors and

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10 Tips For Your Next Survey

Surveys are ubiquitous. We answer them and we develop them because they are an efficient means for collecting feedback and insight from current and prospective customers. Here are a mix of ten tips, insights and philosophies to consider for your next survey. Have clear and testable hypotheses: Ask a realtor and they’ll tell you the

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8 Core Concepts for Quantifying the User Experience

You don’t need to be a mathematician to quantify the problems and improvements in user interfaces. Often the most compelling metrics are simple to compute and require no more than arithmetic and basic algebra. While most of us were exposed to these concepts in 8th and 9th grade, they are easy to forget and probably

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