Many organizations want a score to quantify the user experience of their products. Having a score allows organizations to: Describe whether designs help or hinder an experience. See whether designs improve over time. Compare their users’ experience objectively to competitors or industry standards. But often the effort required to generate that score can be onerous.
User experience research has many methods. Some methods, such as usability testing, are used frequently and have been around for decades. Other, more recent additions, such as click testing, are useful variations on existing methods. Selecting the right UX method means narrowing down the available methods to those that will address (1) the primary research
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,
The PURE (Practical Usability Rating by Experts) method is an analytic technique that identifies potential problems users may encounter with an interface. In a PURE evaluation, evaluators familiar with UX principles and heuristics break down tasks into small steps. They then rate each step, from 1 to 3, based on a pre-defined rubric. The higher the
In an earlier article, I described the PURE methodology. PURE stands for Practical Usability Rating by Experts. Evaluators familiar with UX principles and heuristics decompose tasks into small steps and rate each step based on a pre-defined scoring system (called a rubric), as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: Scoring rubric for PURE. The PURE
