Author: Dana Chisnell
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Yes or No: Make your recruiter smarter
In response to my last post about writing effective screeners, c_perfetti asks: I agree open-ended questions in a screener are best. But one reason some usability professionals use ‘yes/no’ questions is because they don’t have confidence that the external recruiters can effectively assess what an acceptable open ended answer would be. In some cases,…
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Why your screener isn’t working
I get that not every researcher wants to or has time to do her own recruiting of participants. Recruiting always seems like an ideal thing to outsource to someone else. As the researcher, you want to spend your time designing, doing, and analyzing research. So, you find an agency to do the recruiting. Some are…
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Testing in the wild defined
Lately I’ve been talking a lot about “usability testing in the wild.” There are a lot of people out there who make their livings as usability practitioners. Those people know that the conventional way to do usability testing is in a laboratory setting. If you have come to this blog from outside the world of…
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Insights quickly and cheaply
After I gave a day-long seminar and a short talk at UI 13, I sat down with Tim Keirnan of Design Critique to talk about doing usability testing in the wild for quick, cheap insights from users. Download that podcast.
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Recruiting 101: Treat your test participants like humans
One of the most often asked questions I get at talks and workshops is What about recruiting – how do I do a better job of that part of a usability test? One way is to ensure that you’re remembering that the people you recruit are humans. I wrote about this topic for Boxes &…
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Testing in the wild: Conversation with Tim Keirnan
It’s always stimulating talking with Tim Keirnan, who is the host of the podcast Design Critique. We had a great conversation about how to do evaluation of designs in the field rather than in the lab — and how easy and quick it can be. (Recorded in November, 2008)
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Just vote.
Though many people who are eligible to vote were hindered (but not prevented from) registering; though there are obstacles to getting to precincts like having to work or not having transportation; though we have all read and heard the many stories about problems with voting machines — a vote has rarely counted for so much…
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Ditch the book – Come to a virtual seminar on “usability testing in the wild”
I’m excited about getting to do a virtual seminar with the folks at User Interface Engineering (www.uie.com) on Wednesday, October 22 at 1 pm Eastern Time. I’ll be talking about doing “minimalist” usability tests — boiling usability testing down to its essence and doing just what is necessary to gather data to inform design decisions.…
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Usability testing in the wild – ballots
I’ve been busy the last few weeks doing some of the most challenging usability testing I’ve ever done. There were three locations where I did day-long test sessions. But that wasn’t the challenging part. The adventure came in testing ballots for the November election. What was wild about it? This series of tests came together…
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Retrospective review and memory
One of my favorite radio programs (though I listen to it as a podcast) is Radiolab, “ a show about science,” which is a production of WNYC hosted by Robert Krulwich and Jad Abmurad and distributed by NPR. This show contemplates lots of interesting things from reason versus logic in decision making to laughter to…