Author: Dana Chisnell
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Beyond frustration: 3 levels of happy design
Most of us in the UX disciplines are here: Users can use the design, but they’re not excited about it. You already know about eliminating frustration. The team is constantly working to remove obstacles and hindrances that prevent users from reaching their goals. Ideally, through remedying those problems, you’ll gain users’ trust. But it’s more…
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Testing in the wild, seizing opportunity
When I say “usability test,” you might think of something that looks like a psych experiment, without the electrodes (although I’m sure those are coming as teams think that measuring biometrics will help them understand users’ experiences). Anyway, you probably visualize a lab of some kind, with a user in one room and a researcher…
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Tools for plotting a future course of design, checking progress
“Let’s check this against the Nielsen guidelines for intranets,” she said. We were three quarters of the way through completing wireframes for a redesign. We had spent 4 months doing user research, card sorting, prototyping, iterating, and testing (a lot). At the time, going back to the Nielsen Norman Group guidelines seemed like a really…
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Where do heuristics come from?
Recently I had the honor and pleasure of working on a project for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop style guidelines for voting system documentation. Yawner, right? Not at all, it turns out. It made me think about where guidelines and heuristics come from for all kinds of design. Yes, if…
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What are you asking for when you ask for a heuristic evaluation?
Every usability professional I know gets requests to do heuristic evaluations. But it isn’t always clear that the requester actually knows what is involved in doing a heuristic evaluation. Some clients who have asked me to do them have picked up the term “heuristic evaluation” somewhere but often are not clear on the details. Typically,…
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Consensus on observations in real time: Keeping a rolling list of issues
Design teams often need results from usability studies yesterday. Teams I work with always want to start working on observations right away. How to support them while giving good data and ensuring that the final findings are valid? Teams that are fully engaged in getting feedback from users – teams that share a vision…
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Looking for love: Deciding what to observe for
The team I was working with wanted to find out whether a prototype they had designed for a new intranet worked for users. Their new design was a radical change from the site that had been in place for five years and in use by 8,000 users. Going to this new design was a big…
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Popping the big question(s): How well? How easily? How valuable?
When teams decide to do usability testing on a design, it is often because there’s some design challenge to overcome. Something isn’t working. Or, there’s disagreement among team members about how to implement a feature or a function. Or, the team is trying something risky. Going to the users is a good answer. Otherwise, even…
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Thinking inside the right box: Developing tasks for usability test participants
One question I get in workshops on usability testing is How do I get participants to do the tasks I want them to do? On further discussion, we find (the attendee and I) that this question is really asking two things: How do I use usability testing to exercise the design? How do I motivate…