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Validity

by Jeff Sauro, PhD and Jim Lewis, PhD | May 19, 2020

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Rating Scales: Myth vs. Evidence

By Jeff Sauro, PhD and Jim Lewis, PhD . May 19, 2020 . Tags: , , ,
There’s a lot of conventional wisdom floating around the Internet about rating scales. What you should and shouldn’t do. Best practices for points, labels, and formats. It can be hard to differentiate between science-backed conclusions and just practitioner preferences. In this article, we’ll answer some of the more common questions that come up about rating scales, examine claims by reviewing the literature, and summarize the

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Is Usability Testing Effective?

By Jim Lewis, PhD and Jeff Sauro, PhD . March 24, 2020 . Tags: , ,
Questioning the effectiveness of usability testing may sound like a relic from the past. In the early years of industrial usability engineering, there was a constant need to justify the activity of (and your job in) usability testing. The book Cost-Justifying Usability (Bias & Mayhew, 2005) speaks to this. Usability testing has since gained significant adoption in organizations. But that doesn’t mean some of the

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10 Things to Know about the Microsoft Desirability Toolkit

By Jim Lewis, PhD and Jeff Sauro, PhD . February 18, 2020 . Tags: , ,
Who, as a person, doesn’t want to be desirable? And if you’re in the business of developing products or services, who doesn’t want those to be desirable? There is a deep satisfaction beyond the monetary rewards of providing something that people want (and of course, the money’s nice, too). While we’ve found wide interest in wanting to conduct “desirability testing,” there is much less agreement

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What Is a Strong Correlation?

By Jeff Sauro, PhD . June 18, 2019 . Tags: ,
Smoking causes cancer. Warnings on cigarette labels and from health organizations all make the clear statement that smoking causes cancer. But how do we know? Smoking precedes cancer (mostly lung cancer). People who smoke cigarettes tend to get lung and other cancers more than those who don’t smoke. We say that smoking is correlated with cancer. Carefully rule out other causes and you have the ingredients

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Do Attitudes Predict Behavior?

By Jeff Sauro, PhD . June 11, 2019 . Tags:
Should you ask what people think? Are thoughts and feelings reliable indicators of future behavior? Asking about people’s attitudes—especially about their intentions (likelihood to use, recommend, or purchase)—gets a bad rap in UX research. There’s a sort of folk wisdom in User Experience research: People are poor predictors of their future behavior. And this distrust in what people think is rooted in some well-cited articles.

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The Importance of Replicating Research Findings

By Jeff Sauro, PhD . June 4, 2019 . Tags: ,
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, across multiple studies, that simply having larger serving plates make

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Do Promoters Actually Recommend More? A Longitudinal Analysis

By Jeff Sauro, PhD . May 28, 2019 . Tags: ,
The Net Promoter Score introduced a new language of loyalty. At center stage are the promoters and detractors. These designations are given to respondents who answer the How Likely Are You to Recommend (LTR) question as shown below. But what is the justification for the designations? Were they just arbitrarily created? Do they just sound good for executives? How much faith should we put in

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Validating a Lostness Measure

By Jeff Sauro, PhD . May 14, 2019 . Tags: , ,
No one likes getting lost. In real life or digitally. One can get lost searching for a product to purchase, finding medical information, or clicking through a mobile app to post a social media status. Each link, button, and menu leads to decisions. And each decision can result in a mistake, leading to wasted time, frustration, and often the inability to accomplish tasks. But how

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Linking UX Attitudes to Future Website Purchases

By Jeff Sauro, PhD . March 25, 2019 . Tags: , ,
Users' attitudes about an experience affect their future behavior. People who think a website is less usable or less attractive will probably visit less, purchase less, and recommend the website less. Understanding users’ attitudes now (easier to measure) can help predict users’ behavior in the future (harder to measure). At least that’s the idea behind using standardized questionnaires such as the SUPR-Q. But there’s actually not

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Using Task Ease (SEQ) to Predict Completion Rates and Times

By Jeff Sauro, PhD . October 30, 2018 . Tags: , ,
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 a good indication of likely future behaviors. Attitudes can be

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