Ranking questions are a popular way to understand how respondents in UX research prioritize items such as product features, habits, purchases, color schemes, or designs. Forcing participants to make tradeoffs on what’s most important versus least important helps avoid the “everything is important” problem you get when you ask respondents to simply rate how important
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
One of the most popular UX research methods is Think Aloud (TA) usability testing. Having participants speak their thoughts while working on tasks helps researchers identify usability problems and potential fixes. After a TA session, many UX research teams also collect study-level metrics. Study-level metrics are typically asked only once in a study (unlike task-level
Card sorting is a popular UX method. Developers often use card sorting to restructure the navigation (Information Architecture) of a website or a software’s menu structure. But sorting cards isn’t necessarily the most intuitive exercise. It takes concentration and time to think about where to place cards and what to call the groups (for open
One of the most popular UX research methods is Think Aloud (TA) usability testing. Having participants speak their thoughts while working on tasks helps researchers identify usability problems and potential fixes. But does the added burden of speaking while attempting a task make the experience harder and affect perceptions of the website or app being
All of us at MeasuringU® wish you a Happy New Year! In 2022, we posted 48 articles and welcomed several new clients to our MUIQ® UX testing platform, where we continue to add new features and reduce the friction in developing studies and analyzing results. We hosted our ninth UX Measurement Bootcamp—this time a blended
The Single Ease Question (SEQ®) is a single seven-point item that measures the perceived ease of task completion. It is commonly used in usability testing. Since its introduction in 2009 [PDF], some researchers have made variations in its design. Figure 1 shows the version that we currently use. In 2022, we decided to test some
Changing the number of response options in the survey might confuse participants. Over the years, we’ve heard variations on this concern articulated a number of different ways by clients and fellow researchers. Surveys and unmoderated UX studies commonly contain a mix of five-, seven-, and eleven-point scales. That leads some to express concern. Why are
Over the past few months, we’ve conducted several studies with different versions of the seven-point Single Ease Question (SEQ®), a popular task-level metric for perceived ease-of-use. As we’ve seen with other research on rating scales, response means tend to be rather stable despite often salient changes to formatting. In our earlier SEQ research, we found
We use the seven-point Single Ease Question (SEQ®) frequently in our practice, as do many other UX researchers. One reason for its popularity is the body of research that started in the mid-2000s with the comparison of the SEQ to other similar short measures of perceived ease-of-use, the generation of a normative SEQ database, and
