Discovery, Research, and Testing Archives - Page 7 of 16

Honing Your Research Skills Through Ad-hoc Contextual Inquiry

It’s common in our field to hear that we don’t get enough time to regularly practice all the types of research available to us, and that’s often true, given tight project deadlines and limited resources. But one form of user research–contextual inquiry–can be practiced regularly just by watching people use the things around them and asking a few questions. I started thinking about this after a recent experience returning a rental car to a national brand at the Phoenix, Arizona,

April 29, 2014 Deliverables / Design Principles / Discovery, Research, and Testing / Software and Tools

Three Ways to Improve Your Design Research with Wordle

Posted by Jeff Tang

“Above all else show the data.” –Edward Tufte Survey responses. Product reviews. Keyword searches. Forums. As UX practitioners, we commonly scour troves of qualitative data for customer insight. But can we go faster than line-by-line analysis? Moreover, how can we provide semantic analysis to project stakeholders? Enter Wordle. If you haven’t played with it yet, Wordle is a free Java application that generates visual word clouds. It can provide a compelling snapshot of user feedback for analysis or presentation. Using

February 4, 2014 Discovery, Research, and Testing / Learning From Others / Process and Methods

Guerrilla Usability at Conferences

Posted by Nick Cawthon

Does your company have display booths at trade shows and conferences? Typically, these are marketing-dominated efforts, but if you make the case to travel, working the booth can be used for user research. Here’s how I’ve done it. Positioning and justification At times it can be a hard internal sell to justify the costs and diversions to take your one- or two-person show on the road, all the while piggybacking off of another department’s efforts. Yet, standing on your feet

October 29, 2013 Discovery, Research, and Testing / Process and Methods

Context matters

Posted by Maciej Płonka

What makes a marketing e-mail or newsletter efficient? One can judge, for instance, by the number of users that opened the message or clicked on a specified element representing primary action, such as a product link or button. Those indicators measure user engagement precisely; however, they are limited to the last phase of interaction with e-mail or newsletter. The act of clicking certain element in a marketing e-mail is a result of a longer process of identifying, assimilating, and analyzing

October 22, 2013 Design Principles / Discovery, Research, and Testing / Foundational Thinking

Clicking Fast and Slow

Posted by Paul Matthews

Through social psychology and cognitive science, we now know a great deal about our own frailties in the way that we seek, use, and understand information and data. On the web, user interface design may work to either exacerbate or counteract these biases. This article will give a brief overview of the science then look at possible ways that design and implementation can be employed to support better judgements.