TiVo ran 12 user tests in 12 weeks while designing its new website. As TiVo's experience shows, frequent and regular testing keeps the design usability focused.
Computing the net present value (NPV) lets you estimate the most profitable level of usability investment. For big projects, expensive usability can pay off.
Having a specialized usability person is best, but smaller design teams can still benefit when designers do their own user testing and other usability work.
You get the same insights regardless of where you conduct user testing, so there's no reason to test in multiple cities. When a city is dominated by your own industry, however, you should definitely test elsewhere.
6.% of task attempts are extremely slow and constitute outliers in measured user performance. These sad incidents are caused by bad luck that designers can - and should - eradicate.
Most usability practitioners don't derive full value from their user tests because they don't systematically archive the reports. An intranet-based usability archive offers four substantial benefits.
Despite being an artificial situation, user testing generates realistic findings because people engage strongly with the tasks and suspend their disbelief.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At the first Virtual UX Conference, Jakob Nielsen answered participant questions about topics ranging from user-experience careers and skill development to foldable smartphones and the future of user interfaces.
Qualitative and quantitative methods both have their place in user research, but they address different issues in the UX design process. Understand the differences to pick the right method to learn what you need.
To get useful and valid results from a usability study requires a skilled facilitator who avoids biasing the test while ensuring that the users are comfortable. And who can interpret the participants' actions and statements correctly.
To learn something useful from a usability study, you must have the test participants perform tasks that are representative of typical user goals, while avoiding bias caused by giving too detailed directions or hints.
There are two ways to structure a UX research study when we're testing two (or more) designs: we can have each design tested by different people, or we can reuse the same users for all conditions. Each approach has some advantages and problems.
For 30 years, the recommendations have remained the same for improving usability in a UX design project on a tight budget: simplified user testing with 5 users, early test of paper prototypes, and heuristic evaluation.
How to conduct user research for systems with confidential or otherwise sensitive data, for example in domains like healthcare or financial services, where it can be problematic to record screens or otherwise share the user's information.
Usability testing and other UX evaluation methods can be divided into two major categories: formative evaluation and summative evaluation. Both have their place, but at different stages in the design lifecycle, and they have different characteristics, for example in the number of test participants needed for a good study.
可用性测试类似于野生动物如何hunt for food: we're trying to hunt down the design flaws in the user interface and must optimize a series of studies for total gain, rather than spend too much on any one study.
There are a lot of elements involved in a mobile usability test. In this video, we'll walk you through an example test setup, including the necessary equipment, and discuss how to prepare for a test.
Visual design details like fonts and colors can have subtle but important effects on the overall user experience. Use research methods that are sensitive to these effects to test your visual design.
Formative usability testing is best done with a small number of study participants, so that you have time and budget to test more design iterations of the user interface.
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.
Keeping quiet is a powerful moderation technique for user interviews, usability testing, and workshop facilitation. Well-timed, deliberate periods of silence elicit thoughtful, accurate responses and insights, and build trust with participants.
“That’s just one person” and “Our real users aren’t like that” are common objections to findings from qualitative usability testing. Address these concerns proactively to ensure your research is effective.
Evidence from usability studies can be more convincing than what you say. Even if you can easily determine the difference between good and bad designs, test them anyway.
All usability studies involve asking participants to perform tasks, but the correct way to write those tasks depends on the methodology you’re using. Good quantitative tasks are concrete and focused, while good qualitative tasks are open-ended, flexible, and exploratory.
