Dana Chisnell

Tag: usability testing

  • The essence of usability testing, in your pocket

    I’ve encountered a lot of user researchers and designers lately who say to me, “I can’t do all the testing there is to do. The developers are going to have to evaluate usability of the design themselves. But they’re not trained! I’m worried about how to give them enough skills to get good data.” What…

  • Rethinking user research for the social web

    While the Web has evolved from flat documents to being fluidly ambient, we’re using user research methods from 1994. In this session, Dana presents 5 major issues confronting UXers working in the social web, challenges you to creative solutions, and shares experiences from pioneering researchers. Watch the video of this talk from ConveyUX in 2013…

  • Gaining design insights from your research recruiting process

    I gave a virtual seminar for UIE in October 2013 about how to look at recruiting participants for studies as bonus user research. You can get the archived seminar from UIE. Or, have a look at the slides.

  • Just follow the script: Working with pro and proto-pro co-researchers

    She wrote to me to ask if she could give me some feedback about the protocol for a usability test. “Absolutely,” I emailed back, “I’d love that.” By this point, we’d had 20 sessions with individual users, conducted by 5 different researchers. Contrary to what I’d said, I was not in love with the idea of getting…

  • Ending the opinion wars: fast, collaborative design direction

    I’ve seen it dozens of times. The team meets after observing people use their design, and they’re excited and energized by what they saw and heard during the sessions. They’re all charged up about fixing the design. Everyone comes in with ideas, certain they have the right solution to the remedy frustrations users had. Then…

  • Wilder than testing in the wild: usability testing by flash mob

    It was a spectacularly beautiful Saturday in San Francisco. Exactly the perfect day to do some field usability testing. But this was no ordinary field usability test. Sure, there’d been plenty of planning and organizing ahead of time. And there would be data analysis afterward. What made this test different from most usability tests? 16…

  • The true costs of no-shows

    One of the first things people say when they call up looking for help with recruiting is that they want to recruit “12 for 8” or “20 for 15”. They know what they want to end up with. They’ve got to get data. Managers are showing up to observe. They’ve gone through a lot to…

  • 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…

  • 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…