Smoking causes cancer. Warnings on cigarette labels and from health organizations all make the clear statement that smoking causes cancer. But how do we know? Smoking precedes cancer (mostly lung cancer). People who smoke cigarettes tend to get lung and other cancers more than those who don’t smoke. We say that smoking is correlated with cancer.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is widely used. But it’s not necessarily widely loved. Some people are quite critical of the Net Promoter Score. Jared Spool wrote a strong critique of the NPS and Gerry McGovern largely agreed. When I followed up with Jared about his thoughts, he felt that “UX researchers should not use
Your car doesn’t start on some mornings. Your computer crashes at the worst times. Your friend doesn’t show up to your dinner party. If something or someone isn’t reliable, it’s not only a pain but it makes your life less effective and less efficient. And what is true for people and products is true for
Uncovering usability problems is at the heart of usability testing. Problems and insights can be uncovered from observing participants live in a usability lab, using heuristic evaluations, or watching videos of participants. But if you change the person looking for the problems (the evaluator), do you get a different set of problems? The Evaluator Effect
How satisfied are you with your life? How happy are you with your job or your marriage? Are you extroverted or introverted? It’s hard to capture the fickle nature of attitudes and constructs in any measure. It can be particularly hard to do that with just one question or item. Consequently, psychology, education, marketing, and
You don’t need to be a data scientist, database admin, or statistical maven to conduct quantitative research. You must, however, have a good grounding in some fundamental concepts to make the most of the efforts. While there are a number of skills, techniques, and concepts you’ll want to be familiar with, I think it’s essential
Reliability is a measure of the consistency of a metric or a method. Every metric or method we use, including things like methods for uncovering usability problems in an interface and expert judgment, must be assessed for reliability. In fact, before you can establish validity, you need to establish reliability. Here are the four most
