{"id":401,"date":"2017-04-12T03:56:21","date_gmt":"2017-04-12T03:56:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/measuringu.com\/pure\/"},"modified":"2021-01-28T06:30:31","modified_gmt":"2021-01-28T06:30:31","slug":"pure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/measuringu.com\/pure\/","title":{"rendered":"Practical Usability Rating by Experts (PURE)"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a><\/p>\n There\u2019s a continued need to measure and improve the user experience.<\/p>\n In principle, it\u2019s easy to see the benefits of having qualified participants use an interface and measuring the experience to produce reliable metrics that can be benchmarked against<\/a>.<\/p>\n But in practice, a number of obstacles make it difficult: time, cost, finding qualified participants<\/a>, and even obtaining a stable product to test.<\/p>\n These challenges seem even more daunting in the B2B space<\/a> where it\u2019s hard to recruit specialized participants and to get access to enterprise environments. Yet we\u2019ve found that these B2B interfaces are actually less usable and most in need of usability testing. For example, the average number of problems in B2B interfaces was almost twice as high<\/a> compared to consumer software and a magnitude higher than websites.<\/p>\n While there are ways of mitigating each of these challenges, in our experience, many interfaces simply go without any testing at all, only perpetuating the problem. To provide practitioners with another option, I worked with Christian Rohrer at Capital One who created a method that provides a type of score to estimate the amount of \u201cfriction\u201d a typical participant is likely to encounter while using an interface. The method is called PURE, or Practical Usability Rating by Experts, <\/strong>and is based on experts familiar with UX principles and heuristics<\/a>, who rate a user experience based on a pre-defined rubric.<\/p>\n While most UX methods<\/a>\u2014such as usability testing<\/a>, card sorting<\/a>, and surveys<\/a> \u2014are empirical, the PURE method is analytic. It\u2019s not based on directly observing users, but instead relies on experts making judgments on the difficulty of steps users would take to complete tasks. It\u2019s based on principles derived from user behavior. It\u2019s the same idea behind expert reviews, guideline reviews, and Keystroke Level Modeling (KLM)<\/a>. An expert review (often loosely referred to as heuristic evaluations<\/a>)\u00a0 is a popular usability method that involves multiple evaluators examining an interface against a set of rules (called heuristics). The result is a list of problems, or potential problems, users will likely encounter. Expert reviews tend to identify around 30% of the problems<\/a> found from usability tests on the same interface.<\/p>\n Keystroke Level Modeling involves deconstructing tasks into smaller steps and then using pre-calibrated times to estimate how long it would take an expert user to complete the task error free. Applying the PURE method involves a hybrid of expert reviews and KLM.<\/p>\n To apply the PURE method, have two or more evaluators<\/a> complete the following steps:<\/p>\nThe PURE Method<\/h2>\n
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