Dana Chisnell

Category: Blog

  • You are not your user. No matter how good you think you are.

      Listen up, people. This is why — quantity is not quality — you are not your user.   The lesson for today on participant sampling is Google Buzz. Google has been working on Buzz for some time. And it’s a cool idea. Integrating the sharing of photos, status updates, conversations, and email is a thing…

  • User interfaces make Fast Company’s biggest design moments of the last decade

    Of the 14 items that Fast Company chose to include in its selection of the biggest design moments of the years 2000-2009, there were five that were notable for their importance as breakthroughs in user interface and user experience design. Three were specifically related to technology. I’m guessing that most of us will not think…

  • Easier data gathering: Techniques of the pros

    In an ideal world, we’d have one person moderating a user research session and at least one other person taking notes or logging data. In practice it often just doesn’t work out that way. The more people I talk to who are doing user research, the more often I hear from experienced people that they’re…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • What counts: Measuring the effectiveness of your design

    Let’s say you’re looking at these behaviors in your usability test: Where do participants start the task? How easily do participants find the right form? How many wrong turns do they take on the way? Where in the navigation do they make wrong turns? How easily and successfully do they recognize the form they need…

  • 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…