Some participants in usability studies complete a task effortlessly, while others struggle with the same task. In retrospective UX surveys, some respondents report having an easy time using a website and strongly recommend it to others, but others report having a much poorer website experience. Why? What explains the discrepancy between experiences, especially when the
How hard is it to figure out the total cost of a mobile phone service plan? Have you had trouble finding the customer support number for your cable provider? How do you quantify these experiences? What words would you use to describe them? While we have ways of measuring perceived ease using numeric scales, rating
While life can feel like a metaphorical roller coaster, in some cases, there is a literal roller coaster. In 2021, over 100 million people ventured to a theme park in North America. For many of these visitors, the experience started well before the thrill of the ride, when they bought tickets and researched details about
UX research is geared primarily toward understanding how to improve the experience of products, websites, and software. The intent is not to assess people but to use people to assess product experiences. But people’s ability to solve technical problems—what we often loosely refer to as tech savviness—can confound our research findings. That is, including only
ChatGPT. A sequence of letters that didn’t mean much to people a few months ago is now ubiquitous. It seems like every social media post mentions ChatGPT (especially the latest version, 4) and hypes it as a game changer. It’s been used to quickly summarize text, do homework, pass the bar exam, and code the game Duck Hunt
When people need office supplies, they’re unlikely to use Dunder Mifflin; instead, they’ll search online. But like the fictional paper supply company, many well-known office-supply brands (some with physical stores) have struggled to compete with Amazon and haven’t recovered from the impacts of COVID policies on in-person work. In 2019, Office Depot closed 50 stores,
The standard deviation is the most common measure of variability. It’s less intuitive than measures of central tendency such as the mean, but it plays an essential role in analysis and sample size planning. The standard deviation is a key ingredient when building a confidence interval and can be easily computed from a sample of
Think Aloud (TA) usability testing is a popular UX research method. Having participants speak their thoughts as they attempt tasks helps researchers understand sources of misunderstandings, potentially aiding them in identifying and fixing usability problems. It’s such a common technique in usability testing that we suspect few researchers think about the impacts and consequences (positive
What do people buy online? Behind clothing, consumer electronics are at the top of the list. Beyond smartphones, people purchase computers, TVs, tablets, gaming consoles, and a myriad of smartphone accessories. Before purchasing, roughly half of US consumers research details about consumer products online, including features, reviews, and prices. To understand the electronics researching and
Smartphones are ubiquitous in modern life globally and in the US. Almost all Americans have smartphones (85%), with US sales expected to exceed 74 billion dollars. But people don’t just own them, they (we) use them—a lot! Average monthly data use worldwide is expected to increase from 19GB in 2023 to 46GB in 2028 (55GB
