User research offers a learning opportunity that can help you build an understanding of user behavior, but you must resolve discrepancies between research findings and your own beliefs.
Number fetishism leads usability studies astray by focusing on statistical analyses that are often false, biased, misleading, or overly narrow. Better to emphasize insights and qualitative research.
How can a small company's website benefit from usability activities despite a minuscule budget? By integrating four simple and effective usability practices into the design process.
Professionally run design agencies user test their designs to increase the value they deliver to their clients. The challenge is getting clients to understand the benefits of a solid development methodology.
With a paper prototype, you can user test early design ideas at an extremely low cost. Doing so lets you fix usability problems before you waste money implementing something that doesn't work.
Easy test user recruiting is crucial to an effective usability process. The average per-user cost is $171, but varies greatly depending on location and the targeted profession.
A successful usability career requires some theoretical knowledge, but mainly rests on brainpower and many years' experience testing and studying users. The only way to gain that experience is to start now.
According to a recent critical incident analysis, users' most important Web tasks involve collecting and comparing multiple pieces of information, usually so they can make a choice.
In addition to being expensive, collecting usability metrics interferes with the goal of gathering qualitative insights to drive design decisions. As a compromise, you can measure users' ability to complete tasks. Success rates are easy to understand and represent the UX bottom line.
Although measuring usability can cost four times as much as conducting qualitative studies (which often generate better insight), metrics are sometimes worth the expense. Among other things, metrics can help managers track design progress and support decisions about when to release a product.
Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
Across 50 teams, the average time needed for their first usability test of a website was 39 hours. The average site had 11 usability catastrophes that prevented users from completing their tasks.
Discount usability engineering is our only hope. We must evangelize methods simple enough that departments can do their own usability work, fast enough that people will take the time, and cheap enough that it's still worth doing. The methods that can accomplish this are simplified user testing with one or two users per design and heuristic evaluation.
The unprecedented international exposure afforded by the Web increases the designer's responsibility for ensuring international usability. Because of the myriad of issues in international usability, I recommend doing international usability testing with users from a few countries in different parts of the world. No guidelines yet published are sufficiently complete to guarantee perfect international usability, so an empirical reality check is always preferred.
When working on a product intended for use abroad your best bet is to conduct international usability testing. You may need to engage a translator or even a local usability consultant, depending on the complexity of the test.
Icons for Sun Microsystems' website design were designed and tested in several iterations, both independent of and in context with the full Web site design.
Summary of usability results conducted in 1994 on the web sites of Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Time Warner; the report includes screen captures of several famous early websites and because it is one of the first formal usability studies of the Web.
Test early and often is a key recommendation for UX research. Dora Brune shares her approach, including regular Open Test Labs to engage more product teams and make user research more agile. Kinder Eggs make for a nice warmup task, even in remote tests. (Recorded at a participant panel at the UX Conference.)
Usability studies with international users can be very informative, but if you don't speak the foreign language, you will need interpretation to understand the user (and for the user to understand you). These 5 guidelines will improve the value of translated research sessions.
Two user research methods allow you to quickly test a large number of design alternatives, thus accelerating UX innovation. Rapid iterative design and within-subjects testing of multiple alternate designs aren't for every project, but are great when they do apply.
Some business stakeholders say that 5 test users can't represent all customers, and so it's too dangerous to release a new design. Better to keep existing workflows unchanged. How to respond to such claims.
User research, especially for complex apps and domain-specific design, may require study participants with high expertise who can be difficult to recruit. Here are 5 tips for getting expert users.
Improve design decisions by looking at the problem from multiple points of view: combine multiple types of data or data from several UX research methods.
To gain a holistic picture of your users, exchange data with the non-UX teams in your company who are collecting other forms of customer data, besides the user research you do yourself. You gain; they gain.
We compare the budgets needed for different kinds of qualitative user research: in-person usability testing vs. remote studies run by software (unmoderated) or run by a human moderator.
Tips for placing all information about users in a single place, so that the entire UX team can leverage this knowledge. Eden Lazaness shares her experience and demos the tools her team used. This was filmed during a participant experience panel after a recent UX Conference.
Usability testing can yield valuable insights about your content. Make sure you test with the correct users, carefully craft the tasks, and ask the right follow-up questions.
Qualitative and quantitative are both useful types of user research, but involve different methods and answer different questions for your UX design process. Use both!
When stakeholders observe user research sessions, the credibility and acceptance of findings will increase. Since they are busy, make it easy to participate and work on increasing the value they get out of going.
Ask users to keep a diary throughout a fairly long period is great for researching customer journeys or other bigger-scope issues in user experience that go beyond a single interaction.
Nobody has enough user-research budget to test everything, so you must focus usability testing on those features that will matter the most for the user experience and have the most business impact. Here's a simple method to prioritize what to test.
Virtual reality (VR) user interfaces are currently more difficult for users to manipulate than a traditional GUI, partly because of more degrees of freedom and partly because VR is still new, so people have less experience using it. Advice for how to employ usability studies to alleviate this problem.
Learn how to run a remote moderated usability test. This second video covers how to actually facilitate the session with the participant and how to end with debrief, incentive, and initial analysis with your team.
In remote usability studies, it's hard to identify test participants who should not be in the study because they don't fit the profile or don't attempt the task seriously. This is even harder in unmoderated studies, but it can (and should) be done.
The total customer journey and user experience quality will benefit from considering market research and user research to be highly related, and to integrate the two, instead of keeping different kinds of research teams from collaborating.
Usability studies with children and teenagers are as valuable as any other user research, but require special attention to both participant recruiting and study facilitation. You can't act the same with kids as you would with adults.
Both UX workshops and usability tests benefit when facilitators are focused on goals, follow a meeting guide yet are open to improvisation, encourage participants to act, and don’t talk too much.
Know the inherent biases in your recruiting process and avoid them in order to recruit study participants that are representative for your target audience.
Unsure where to start? Use this collection of links to our articles and videos to learn about planning, conducting, and analyzing qualitative user testing.
Pain points are problems that occur at the different levels of the customer experience: interaction level, customer-journey level, or relationship level.
User testing in different countries helps identify culturally specific usability issues. Testing correctly and at the right time will help you thrive in a new market.
Poorly designed qualitative or quantitative research may produce invalid results. Avoid encouraging certain responses or behaviors and make sure that your study conditions and participants are representative.
Sometimes you should intentionally overrecruit test participants for one-on-one user-research studies. Backup participants must be recruited according to the same screening criteria and paid at least as much as regular participants.
Exact costs will vary, but an unmoderated 5-participant study may be 20–40% cheaper than a moderated study, and may save around 20 hours of researcher time.
Remote unmoderated usability testing is so fast and easy that some teams make it their only evaluation method. But don’t shy away from its more robust alternative, the remote moderated usability test, which can give you more information and is also inexpensive.
The 6 steps for running unmoderated usability testing are: define study goals, select testing software, write task descriptions, pilot the test, recruit participants, and analyze the results.
Many platforms for unmoderated usability testing have similar features; to choose the best tool for your needs, focus on the type of data that you need to collect for your goals.
