Years ago, we were watching people try to find products on IKEA.com. (Not for IKEA, but for our other nefarious purposes.) We took several stabs at our study because, well, the first ones seemed fishy to us. Our initial stab had simple tasks. One of them was “Find a bookcase for your living room that [...]

Sure, you already know that data-driven decision-making can be a great thing. And a survey can be a great way of getting hold of a lot of data. But if you’ve ever had to complete a frustrating survey asking seemingly mindless questions, and we all have, then the idea of having to design one yourself [...]

How likely am I to recommend United Airlines to someone else? If asked this question, I’d answer that it’s pretty likely, especially if that person lives here in the greater Boston area. Of all the major airlines, United has the best service out of Boston. The only other options if you need to travel all [...]

Well, we’ve just wrapped up the first day of the UIE Web App Masters Tour stop in Seattle. What a day! Blogger Pam Rodriguez has done a tremendous job summarizing the first day’s sessions. You can read them here: My talk: Mobilism & UX: Inside the Eye of the Perfect Storm Bill Scott’s talk: Designing [...]

When you have billions of clicks in your analytics log files, how do you pick out the right ones for making decisions? When do you trust your own well-honed sense of good design and when do you look to what your users are telling you? At the first stop of the Web App Masters Tour [...]

“We learned that it was all about getting the basics right,” the product manager told me, having just come back from a tour of observing multiple customers. “We can invest in all the nifty new features we want, but if we don’t get the product’s basic features to work right, our users don’t care.” This [...]

Picking the right assumptions to measure against can improve our results, but basing our measures on the wrong assumptions can send us in the wrong direction. Former UIEer Joshua Porter wrote a blog post recently, Why A/B Testing Isn’t Just About Small Changes, that captured the attention of the twitterati. His point, which is a [...]