Category: Blog
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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…
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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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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.…