UX research pulls many terms, methods, and conventions from other fields. Selecting a method is an important first choice in measuring the user experience. But an important next step is understanding the variables you’ll have to deal with when designing a study or drawing conclusions. Variables are things that change. Variables can be controlled and measured.
Methods evolve and adapt. The same is true of UX methods that have evolved from other methods, often from disparate fields and dating back decades. The usability profession itself can trace its roots to the industrial revolution. The think aloud protocol, one of the signature methods of usability testing, can trace its roots to psychoanalysis,
You’ve probably heard of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment by Philip Zimbardo (especially if you took an intro psych class). The shocking results had similar implications to the notorious Milgram experiment and suggested our roles may be a major cause for past atrocities and injustices. You might have also heard about research from Cornell University that found,
The hold music. The wait time. The menu that always seems to have just changed. Calling customer service is not usually what people want to do in their spare time. But it’s often necessary and represents an important touchpoint for companies that interact with their customers. Understanding why people call customer support is also a
How much did you spend on Amazon last week? If you had to provide receipts or proof of purchases, how accurate do you think your estimate would be? In an earlier article we reported on the first wave of findings for a UX longitudinal study. We found that attitudes toward the website user experience tended
Watching how people interact with an interface tells you a lot about what works and what needs improvement. And while observing behavior is essential for understanding the user experience, it’s not enough. Just because a product does what it should, is priced right, and is reliable, doesn’t mean it provides a good user experience. Users
It was another busy year at MeasuringU. We posted 50 new articles, added new features to MUIQ—our UX testing platform, hosted our 6th UX Bootcamp, and released the book, Benchmarking the User Experience. We also moved into a bigger new space in Denver’s Cherry Creek neighborhood. It’s three times the size of our old space
The wide range of UX methods is one of the things that makes UX such an interesting field. Some methods have been around for decades (like usability testing), others are more recent additions, while some seem to be just slight variations on other existing methods. We’ve been tracking and analyzing the methods UX professionals report
UX research efforts should be driven by business questions and a good hypothesis. Whether the research is a usability evaluation (unmoderated or moderated), survey, or an observational method like a contextual inquiry, decisions need to be made about question wording, response options, and tasks. But in the process of working through study details, often the
It was another busy year on MeasuringU.com with 50 new articles, a new website, a new unmoderated research platform (MUIQ), and our 5th UX Bootcamp. In 2017 over 1.2 million people viewed our articles. Thank You! The most common topics we covered include: usability testing, benchmarking, the 3Ms of methods, metrics and measurement, and working
