A disorganized closet. A messy bedroom. Clutter can make a space feel stressful and make it hard to find things. But it’s not just your mother talking about clutter. We often use the same language to describe digital spaces like websites. In our UX research practice, we have frequently encountered users and designers criticizing website
How do you measure tech savviness? UX researchers are, of course, not in the business of assessing individual performance. But differences in individual technical abilities certainly have an impact on performance. A good measure of tech savviness can help researchers target levels of tech savviness in recruiting (e.g., low, high, or a mix) and classify
It’s hard to call a product or app successful if people don’t use it. But how will you know if people will use a product and continue to use it? There’s a strong need to understand technology adoption and usage. The first step in predicting and understanding why people do or don’t adopt tech is
Is the product useful? Is it easy to use? Numerous variables affect whether we purchase, use, and adopt a new technology. But two consistent contributors are whether it does what we want it to do (usefulness) and if it’s easy to use (usability). These apply to consumer and business products. This “model” of tech adoption
The primary driving forces of evolution are variation, competition, and natural selection. In the domain of rating scales, variants are developed and tested to see which variant has the best measurement properties, and the winner of that competition survives to appear in future studies. The Single Ease Question (SEQ®) is a single seven-point question asked
What’s the return on investment (ROI) for UX research activities? Do better user experiences lead to desirable business outcomes? If a product is more useful and more usable, then people should be more likely to purchase, use, and recommend it. But how can we quantify these links? Understanding the ROI of UX research starts with
It’s a lot faster to mock up an image of a webpage than to build a working webpage. Using images as prototypes allows for quick iterations and testing by having participants click on locations as if it were a real working webpage or app. But does an image used in a click test elicit the
Purchases and referrals are two closely tracked company metrics. If you can predict the extent to which people will purchase and recommend, then you will have some idea about future revenue and growth. Much of that forecasting is done through surveys using behavioral intention questions. The behavior for purchasing is, of course, actually buying something.
It’s hard to conduct user research without users. And current and prospective users are often people who sign up to an online panel to get paid for taking studies. But who are these people who spend time taking surveys, unmoderated usability studies, and product concept evaluations? Can we trust them? We’ve written before about the
One box, two box, red box, blue box … Box scoring isn’t just something they do in baseball. Response options for rating scale data are often referred to as boxes because, historically, paper-administered surveys displayed rating scales as a series of boxes to check, like the one in Figure 1. Figure 1: Illustration of “boxes”
