Dana Chisnell

Category: Blog

  • What’s the best way to find people for user research and usability testing?

    There are lots of great sources of participants for usability studies and other user research. The key: know what behavioryou want to learn about. For example: Playing online games Voting Planning for retirement Shopping for a new car Treating a chronic illness Note that there’s nothing about demographics here. After you identify the behaviors you…

  • Usability testing is HOT

    For many of us, usability testing is a necessary evil. For others, it’s too much work, or it’s too disruptive to the development process. As you might expect, I have issues with all that. It’s unfortunate that some teams don’t see the value in observing people use their designs. Done well, it can be an…

  • Involving older adults in design of the user experience: Inclusive design

    Despite the reality of differences due to aging, research has also shown that in many cases, we do not need a separate design for people who are age 50+. We need better design for everyone. Everyone performs better on web sites where the interaction matches users’ goals; where navigation and information are grouped well; where…

  • Bonus research: Do the recruiting yourself

    There are some brilliant questions on Quora. This morning, I was prompted to answer one about recruiting. The question asker asked, How do I recruit prospective customers to shadow as a part of a user-centered design approach? The asker expanded, thusly: I’m interested in shadowing prospective customers in order to better understand how my tool…

  • Usability testing is broken: Rethinking user research for social interaction design

    How many of you have run usability tests that look like this: Individual, one-hour sessions, in which the participant is performing one or more tasks from a scenario that you and your team have come up with, on a prototype, using bogus or imaginary data. It’s a hypothetical situation for the user, sometimes, they’re even…

  • Researcher as director: scripts and stage direction

    For most teams, the moderator of user research sessions is the main researcher. Depending on the comfort level of the team, the moderator might be a different person from session to session in the same study. (I often will moderate the first few sessions of a study and then hand the moderating over to the…

  • Is your team stuck in a bubble?

    This happens. The team is heads down, just trying to do work, to make things work, and then you realize it. Perspective is gone. Recently I gave a couple of talks about usability testing and collaboratively analyzing data. There was a guy in the first row who was super attentive as I showed screen shots…

  • Usability isn’t just about eliminating frustration anymore

    [This is an excerpt of an article published in UX Magazine on June 16, 2010.] I’m a devotee of TED talks. I was once assigned to watch several TED talks to deconstruct what made each a good or a bad presentation. TED topics are wide-ranging, though they generally relate to the categories that make up…

  • Overcoming fear of moderating UX research sessions

    It always happens: Someone asks me about screwing up as an amateur facilitator/moderator for user research and usability testing sessions. This time, I had just given a pep talk to a bunch of user experience professionals about sharing responsibility with the whole team for doing research. “But what if the (amateur) designer does a bad…

  • Making sense of the data: Collaborative data analysis

    I’ve often said that most of the value in doing user research is in spending time with users — observing them, listening to them. This act, especially if done by everyone on the design team, can be unexpectedly enlightening. Insights are abundant. But it’s data, right? Now that the team has done this observing, what…