Topics
Topics
User Experience BS Generator
It’s been ten years since the dot-com flame-out began. In those ten years we’ve seen the rise of User Experience. User Experience seems to have a lot of buzz and gets attached to all sorts of activities that have little to do with the user or the experience. It has all but replaced the terms
The Faces In The Crowdsourcing
Who would toil away for pennies, completing trivial tasks and answering surveys? A quarter-million users registered with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. Just who exactly are the people behind the Mechanical Turk and can we rely on the data we get from the nameless faceless masses ? In this blog posted on Oracle.com I review two
iPhone vs. Desktop: Which is Faster?
If you have an iPhone, you probably love it like I do. You probably also use it a lot like I do. The features and apps and, of course, the user interface make using the iPhone a rich and rewarding experience. Where I once had to wait till I got to my computer to send
Do You Need A Random Sample For Your Usability Test?
Usability tests are conducted on samples of users taken from a larger user population. In usability testing it is hard enough to recruit and test users let alone select them randomly from the larger user population. Samples in usability studies are almost always convenience samples. That is, we rely on volunteers to participate in our
Will Five Users Really Find 85% Of All Usability Problems?
If you ask five users to take a look at a website or application you will find usability problems. If you fix those problems then ask another five users you will get another set of problems. Over time there will be fewer and fewer problems found, but a new set of users will still continue
What To Do With Task Times When Users Fail A Task
It would be nice if all users completed tasks in a usability test. If they did you wouldn’t have to worry about what to do with their task times if they are unable to complete the task. But then again, if all your users had no problems completing tasks, you wouldn’t worry about improving usability.
Average Task Times in Usability Tests: What to Report?
How long does it take users to complete a task? We really don’t know. Instead we have to take our best guess from a sample of users. But if you had to pick a single number to summarize how long it would take typical users to complete a task from a usability test what would
Usability Testing Is Not QA Testing
A user-interface problem is anything in the code or design that inhibits a user from completing an intended action. Usability testing is best done in the formative stages of development to find these UI problems and generate quantifiably better designs. Usability testing also has a summative role at the end of development as validation when
Can You Measure Task Time If Users Think Aloud During A Usability Test?
While it might seem like having users think aloud while they complete a task will increase the time on task—the literature is actually mixed. Some studies report no difference, some show longer task times for thinking aloud and others report faster task times for thinking aloud. It has been hypothesized that the reason users can
Do Severe Problems Affect More Users Than Trivial Ones?
While testing with five users might reveal 85% of problems that impact 31% of users (given a set of tasks and user-type), it doesn’t mean you’re finding 85% of the critical problems. Are severe usability problems likely to occur more frequently, less frequently or is problem severity independent of frequency? The data on this is
How Should You Display Links To PDF Files?
I’m always gathering and looking at data. One consequence of this is having to reconcile conflicting data-points—say data from users who express different perspectives on an issue. For example, one of my articles was recently tweeted with the note: “any website with the name usability in it should let you know you’re clicking on a
Why you only need to test with five users (explained)
One question I get a lot is, Do you really only need to test with 5 users? There are a lot of strong opinions about the magic number 5 in usability testing and much has been written about it (e.g. see Lewis 2006PDF). As you can imagine there isn’t a fixed number of users that