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Report Usability Issues in a User by Problem Matrix

A lot happens when you observe a user during a usability test. There’s the interface, the utterances, the body language and the metrics. This rich experience can result in a long list of usability issues. Issues can range from cosmetic (a user finds the type in ALL CAPS a bit much) to catastrophic (data loss),

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10 Things to Know about the Single Usability Metric (SUM)

There is no usability thermometer to tell you how easy to use a website or software application is. Instead we rely on the outcomes of good and bad experiences which provide evidence for the construct of usability. Combining multiple usability metrics into a single usability metric (SUM) is something we proposed seven years ago[PDF] and

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Measuring the Customer Experience: Questions and Answers

This week I was invited to share my thoughts on challenges and insights into measuring the customer and user experience during a live chat on Twitter hosted by the folks at Vivisimo. We had 904 tweets which generated 2,304,670 impressions, reaching an audience of 311,413 followers. Here’s a bit of what we discussed. Isn’t revenue

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Measuring Errors in the User Experience

Errors happen and unintended actions are inevitable. They are a common occurrence in usability tests and are the result of problems in an interface and imperfect human actions. It is valuable to have some idea about what these are, how frequently they occur, and how severe their impact is. First, what is an error? Slips

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5 Valuable Skills for UX Professionals

The background, education and skills of professionals in User Experience are diverse. Regardless of whether you’re more on the research side or more on the design side of the User Experience, here are five skills that will make you more valuable and effective in your job. 1.    Coding No you’re not a developer, you probably

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How to Conduct a Usability Test on a Mobile Device

When it comes to testing websites there are many unmoderated and moderated solutions. But if you’ve ever tried to evaluate an app or website on a mobile phone or tablet there are fewer options. Usertesting.com offers a new mobile testing service which recruits users and records their mobile devices while they interact with your app

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10 Things to Know About Net Promoter Scores and the User Experience

Increasingly companies are adopting the Net Promoter Score as the corporate metric. In many companies, all metrics, including user experience metrics, should roll up to the Net Promoter Score. Here are 10 things to know about the Net Promoter Score if you’re concerned about improving the user experience. The Net Promoter Score is a measure

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6 Proportions to Compare when Improving the User Experience

One of the simplest ways to measure any event is a binary metric coded as a 1 or 0. Such a metric represents the presence or absence of just about anything of interest: Yes/ No,  Pass/ Fail, Purchase/No Purchase, On/Off. Fundamentally the binary system is at the heart of computing as we know it. It

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20 Tips for your Next Moderated Usability Test

Despite the rise in unmoderated usability testing, the bulk of evaluations are still done with a facilitator. Whether you are sitting next to the user in a lab or sharing screens with someone thousands of miles away, here are 20 practical tips for your next moderated usability test. Shut up and listen:  You need to

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10 Things to Know about Card Sorting

Here are at least 10 things to know about using this popular user research method. Card Sorting involves having users (not designers, developers or VP’s) sort a list of pages or categories together based on their understanding of the structure and relationship.Card sorting is useful for such things as finding out how users would group

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8 Advantages of Standardized Usability Questionnaires

In a usability evaluation it’s good practice to measure both how users perform on realistic tasks and what they think about the usability of the interface. But what exactly DO you ask the users? “Is this usable?” … “Is the interface easy to use?” … “Did you like using the app?” While you can cobble

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10 Things to know about Confidence Intervals

You don’t need a PhD in statistics to understand and use confidence intervals. Because we almost always sample a fraction of the users from a larger population, there is uncertainty in our estimates. Confidence intervals are an excellent way of understanding the role of sampling error in the averages and percentages that are ubiquitous in

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