Benchmark your UX by first determining appropriate metrics and a study methodology. Then track these metrics across different releases of your product by running studies that follow the same established methodology.
Will the UX field value people who change careers from another field and want to become user experience professionals? Will the field still value them if they're a bit older, and how do they compete with fresh graduates?
In case of slow response times in a user interface, indicate that the wait time will soon be over by showing an animation. For longer delays use a percent-done indicator.
Design elements that appear similar in some way — sharing the same color, shape, or size — are perceived as related, while elements that appear dissimilar are perceived as belonging to separate groups.
Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb for UX and not specific usability guidelines.
Modern day UX research methods answer a wide range of questions. To know when to use which method, each of 20 methods is mapped across 3 dimensions and over time within a typical product-development process.
Visualizing user attitudes and behaviors in an empathy map helps UX teams align on a deep understanding of end users. The mapping process also reveals any holes in existing user data.
Empathy maps, customer journey maps, experience maps, and service blueprints depict different processes and have different goals, yet they all build common ground within an organization.
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.
Open-ended questions prompt people to answer with sentences, lists, and stories, giving deeper and new insights. Closed-ended questions limit the answers but give tighter stats.
Eyetracking research shows that people scan webpages and phone screens in various patterns, one of them being the shape of the letter F. Eleven years after discovering this pattern, we revisit what it means today.
User interviews have become a popular technique for getting user feedback, mainly because they are fast and easy. Use them to learn about users’ perceptions of your design, not about its usability.
Showing users things they can recognize improves usability over needing to recall items from scratch because the extra context helps users retrieve information from memory.
Demonstrating the value of design improvements and other UX work can be done by calculating the return-on-investment (ROI). Usually you compare before/after measures of relevant metrics, but sometimes you have to convert a user metrics into a business-oriented KPI (key performance indicator).
角色是not "one size fits all" in the UX design process. Broad-scope personas work for high-level divisions but are too shallow for detailed design decisions.
Users’ “productivity” tasks differ from “engagement” tasks, in whether more or less is better for metrics like time on tasks, interactions, and page views. Such KPIs are important, but they must be evaluated relative to users' tasks.
Many best practices for high-quality content creation and management will inevitably be skipped over, unless they are explicitly planned for as user stories within any Agile development project.
A general technique that's helpful in many kinds of UX workshops and design ideation is to first have team members work independently to create diverging ideas and solutions. Then, as a separate step, everybody works together to converge on the final outcome.
A clear vision gives the team something to aim for, and this is especially important for intranet projects, which often involve contributors from many different departments or functions.
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.
Preparing a guide for a user interview ensures that topics relevant to your research questions are covered, and that the interview captures in-depth information about people’s lives and needs.
Livestreams allow users to see products in detail and get their questions answered in real time. They can be integrated in ecommerce websites and on social-networking apps.
Facilitators can use 3 ascending levels of intervention tactics to maintain positive momentum in groups with participants who monopolize activities and limit diversity of perspectives.
Confirmatory and destructive actions should be far apart from each other; use additional redundant visual signals to differentiate between them and avoid user errors.
Communication is the top challenge when designing remotely, according to 213 UX professionals. Receiving feedback, replicating informal conversations, and maintaining a clear direction on projects were the biggest communication concerns.
