Topics
Topics
Quantifying the Value of a Promoter
Erin Bradner loves Zippgo moving containers. She described to a group of 150 people at the Lean UX Denver conference how she loved using those durable containers in her last move. Erin is a promoter. She’s personally vouching for, and communicating the value and utility of, someone else’s product. Erin gets no commission or recognition
Five Critical Quantitative UX Concepts
If you’re in User Experience, chances are you probably didn’t get into the field because of your love of math. As UX continues to mature it’s becoming harder to avoid using statistics to quantify design improvements. One of my goals is to help make challenging concepts more approachable and accessible. Last week Jim Lewis and
Applying the Pareto Principle to the User Experience
In 1906 Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, observed that wealth was unequally distributed in Italy. He noted that 80% of the land and wealth was owned by 20% of the people. A similar relationship can be observed in the wealth and income across most countries. A minority of the population tends to generate the majority
How Effective are Heuristic Evaluations?
It’s a question that’s been around since Nielsen and Molich introduced the discount usability method in 1990. The idea behind discount usability methods, like heuristic evaluations in particular and expert reviews in general, is that it’s better to uncover some usability issues –even if you don’t have the time or budget to test actual users.
Triangulate for Better User Research
Last year a friend was getting married on the island of Kauai in Hawaii. If you’ve ever flown to Hawaii from the mainland US you might have heard of the “Halfway to Hawaii” game. It’s something the flight attendants organize to help distract folks from the long flight. All the passengers are invited to guess
9 Biases in Usability Testing
Usability testing is artificial. We do the best we can to simulate a scenario that is as close to what users would actually do with the software while we observe or record them. However, no amount of realism in the tasks, data, software or environment can change the fact that the whole thing is contrived.
The Value of Multiple Evaluators in Heuristic Evaluations
Heuristic evaluations are one of the “discount” usability methods introduced over 20 years ago by Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich. In theory, a heuristic evaluation involves having a trained usability expert inspect an interface with compliance to a set of guiding principles (heuristics), such as Nielsen’s 10 heuristics. In practice, most expert reviews of an
The F-Word in User Experience
“We want to conduct a focus group to improve our software.” It’s something I hear a couple times a month, and almost always when I’m speaking with a product manager, marketer or someone unfamiliar with usability. It’s so common that we UX professionals have wryly come to call it the “F-word,” a phrase I first
7 Core Ideas about Personas and The User Experience
A public personality, an assumed identity or a character in a novel–the term persona is used widely in our vernacular. But, when it comes to User Experience (UX), a persona takes on a more specific meaning. Personas are a widely used in UX Research with 65% of practitioners reporting using them on projects. Here are
Lean Doesn’t Mean Less: Understanding Lean UX
In the 1990s Six Sigma was the hot quality improvement program. Born out of industrial manufacturing Six Sigma uses statistical methods and process-improvement techniques to save costs and boost profits by identifying and eliminating defects. Over the span of a decade Six Sigma evolved from the assembly line to the cubicle. Now even information workers
Card Sorting + Tree Testing : The Science of Great Site Navigation
Card sorting is a popular method for understanding the mental model of the user. Instead of organizing a website by some byzantine corporate structure, you base it on how the users think by having them sort items into categories. It’s a method used as often as lab-based usability testing with 52% of practitioners using it
9 Insights From Ecommerce Usability Studies
Have you wanted to purchase something online, but couldn’t? Were you willing to pay full price just to get a product but the experience got in the way? You’re not alone. Just about every week we’re running a usability test in our lab or remotely on an ecommerce website. We’ve watched thousands of users attempt