Our attitudes both reflect and affect our actions. What we think affects what we do and what we do affects what we think. It’s not a perfect relationship of course. What people say or think doesn’t always directly correspond to actions in easily predictable ways. Understanding and measuring user attitudes early and often can provide
Surveys often suffer from having too many questions. Many items are redundant or don’t measure what they intend to measure. Even worse, survey items are often the result of “design by committee” with more items getting added over time to address someone’s concerns. Let’s say an organization uses the following items in a customer survey:
The effectiveness of surveys starts with the quality of the questions. Question writing is an art and a science. You need to balance your needs and the needs of the organization commissioning the survey with the burden on the respondents. Here’s a summary of 12 useful guidelines we use, pulled from books and articles. 1.
Questionnaires are an effective way for gauging sentiments toward constructs like usability, loyalty, and the quality of the website user experience. A standardized questionnaire is one that has gone through psychometric validation. That means the items used in the questionnaire have been shown to: 1. Offer consistent responses (reliability) 2. Measure what they are intended
Was a task difficult or easy to complete? Performance metrics are important to collect when improving usability but perception matters just as much. Asking a user to respond to a questionnaire immediately after attempting a task provides a simple and reliable way of measuring task-performance satisfaction. Questionnaires administered at the end of a test such
Have you ever watched a user perform horribly during a usability test only to watch in amazement as they rate a task as very easy to use? I have, and as long as I’ve been conducting usability tests, I’ve heard of this contradictory behavior from other researchers. Such occurrences have led many to discount the
