Articles

Susan Farrell

Farrell joined All Turtles, an AI product studio, in 2017, where she leads UX Research and Strategy for chatbots and smart-device systems. She was previously an early member of Nielsen Norman Group, from 1999-2017, where she consulted with dozens of companies —  multinationals, government, open source, and early startups — regarding website and mobile device usability, interaction design and information architecture. She conducted the User Experience Careers survey, co-authored the E-Commerce User Experience research series, conducted accessibility research for the Usability Guidelines for Accessible Web Design report, and contributed to many other NN/g research reports.

Articles and Videos

  • From Research Goals to Usability-Testing Scenarios: A 7-Step Method

    Developing goals for a usability study, deciding what to test, and crafting user scenarios can be challenging. This method makes the process straightforward.

  • Search-Log Analysis: The Most Overlooked Opportunity in Web UX Research

    Your website’s search engine can tell you what your web visitors want, how they look for it, and how well your content strategy meets their needs.

  • Group Notetaking for User Research

    Teams can use digital chronological logs or affinity diagrams to capture notes, and then aggregate these notes into top findings with the whiteboard method.

  • How to Collaborate with Stakeholders in UX Research

    When teams become involved with users, they become better at preventing problems and faster at delivering usable software.

  • UX Research Cheat Sheet

    User research can be done at any point in the design cycle. This list of methods and activities can help you decide which to use when.

  • 27 Tips and Tricks for Conducting Successful User Research in the Field

    Leave your office, already, and go where the users are. There are some common pitfalls, but they can be avoided if you learn from our experience.

  • Project Management for User Research: The Plan

    How to make a great UX research plan to document the goals, methods, and logistics necessary to repeat the study.

  • Observer Guidelines for Usability Research

    Let stakeholders help gather data during user research sessions. Customize this handout for observers to fit your situation.

  • Field Studies

    Field research is conducted in the user’s context and location. Learn the unexpected by leaving the office and observing people in their natural environment.

  • 28 Tips for Creating Great Qualitative Surveys

    Qualitative surveys ask open-ended questions to find out more, sometimes in preparation for doing quantitative surveys. Test surveys to eliminate problems.