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Three Easy Metrics For Improving Website Navigation

If a user can’t find the information does it exist? The inability of users to find products, services and information is one of the biggest problems and opportunities for website designers. Knowing users’ goals and what top tasks they attempt on your website is an essential first step in any (re)design. Testing and improving these

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Five Important Things To Do Before Any Redesign

It’s time for that major redesign. A long list of bugs, feature-requests and usability problems have accumulated and it’s time to fix that website, intranet or software application. Where do you start? Do look for a new technology, feature requests from the VP, the oldest, most neglected problems in the bug-tracking database? All of these

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How To Estimate A Survey Response Rate

How many people will respond to your survey?  It would be nice if you knew ahead of time. Here’s a simple technique I use to get an idea about the total number of responses I can expect from a survey invite. Perform a Soft-Launch (aka Pre-Test): It’s always a good idea to pre-test your survey

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Usability and Net Promoter Benchmarks for Consumer Software

Many software companies track and use the Net Promoter Score as a gauge of customer loyalty. Positive word of mouth is a critical driver of future growth. If you have a usable product, customers will tell their friends about the positive experience. And alternatively, a poor user experience will lead customers to tell their friends

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Should You Care If Your Rating Scale Data Is Interval Or Ordinal?

It’s fine to compute means and statistically analyze ordinal data from rating scales. But just because one rating is twice as high as another does not mean users are really twice as satisfied. When we use rating scales in surveys, we’re translating intangible fuzzy attitudes about a topic into specific quantities. Overall, how satisfied are

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Four Terrific And Four Terrible User Experiences

When we look to improve the user experience of software or websites, sometimes the best improvements aren’t slight tweaks to the interface but involve eliminating steps altogether. Here are four examples from the physical world that may inspire improvements in the digital world followed by four experiences that can use some refining. Four Terrific User

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How much does the usability test affect perceptions of usability?

It is one of the most important questions to ask when measuring usability. Just how much does the process of measuring impact the metrics we collect? In measuring perceived usability of five popular websites, I found that a single difficult task lowered post-test usability scores by 8%. This was largely driven by users with the

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How To Interpret Survey Responses: 5 Techniques

Closed ended rating scale data is easy to summarize and hard to interpret. Ideally you can compare the responses to an industry benchmark, a competitor or even a similar survey question from a prior survey. In most cases this data doesn’t exist, it’s too expensive or too difficult to obtain. This leaves product managers and

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8 Research Based Insights For User Experience Surveys

It’s easy to get derailed when writing a survey or questionnaire. On top of worrying what to ask and who to ask, you have to worry about how to ask the questions so you don’t distort the real views of the respondents. Here are eight things to help make the process a little smoother: Use

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Are both positive and negative items necessary in questionnaires?

There is a long tradition of including items in questionnaires that are phrased both positively and negatively. This website was easy to use. It was difficult to find what I needed on this website. The major reason for alternating item wording is to minimize extreme response bias and acquiescent bias. However, some recent research[pdf] Jim

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Will The Real Task-Time Please Stand Up?

Why spend more time completing a task when it could be done in less time? Users become very cognizant of inefficient interactions and this is especially the case with tasks that are repeated often. Task time is the best way to measure the efficiency of a task and it is a metric that everyone understands.

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