UIEtips 3/7/06: Interview-Based Tasks: Learning from Leonardo DiCaprio

Interview-based tasks are a radical usability testing technique, designed to counter problems that arise when assumptions are made about how users solve their own problems.

The topic of our next UIE Virtual Seminar is so important, and no one talks about it. On Thursday, January 28, Steve Portigal will deliver his talk: Deep Dive Interviewing Secrets: Making Sure You Don’t Leave Key Information Behind.
(Oh, and by the way, our last event sold out, so you’ll want to Register your [...]

In our next UIE Virtual Seminar, Recruiting for Usability Testing on Wednesday, September 30, usability testing expert Dana Chisnell shows you how to maximize your time and money on the right participants to get the right results.  
User experience research lives or dies by the appropriateness of the participants in the study.
UX researchers just don’t [...]

UIEtips 4/24/07: Five Techniques for Getting Buy-In for Usability Testing UIE’s Christine Perfetti discusses the 5 best techniques for convincing management and key stakeholders of the benefits of incorporating usability testing into the formal design process.

Have you looked at your site with Javascript disabled?
Robert Nyman does just that with the Nokia and SonyEricsson UK sites and finds some surprising results. It’s quite a good write up.
Very much worth a read followed by the obvious next step: checking your own site out the same way.
[Hat tip to NortyPig]

UIE Virtual Seminar – The Quick, the Cheap, and the Insightful: Conducting Usability Tests in the Wild
With Dana Chisnell of Usabilityworks
Date: Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Time: 1pm ET
It’s not clear when “quick and dirty” became a dirty phrase in the usability world. There are those that believe that testing must be scientific, and that takes time [...]

On one of the member-only lists I hang out on, there’s been a discussion about asking participants in studies to role play in a usability test’s scenario. Instead of saying,
“Find information about the costs for summer camps in Vermont”
the list member asked if there was a problem with using a scenario like this [...]

In this episode of Usability Tools, Brian Christiansen and I continue on how to moderate a usability test.

In this episode of Usability Tools, Brian Christiansen and I talk about how to moderate a usability test. Turns out, the episode got so long that we decided to break it into two parts. This week’s show focuses upon the different roles a single moderator needs to take on during the session.

Yesterday, I talked about how we come up with each row in our Weighted Differences Matrix. For each of these differences, we need to then assess how important it will be to the user’s experience, which we represent with a weight. The weight is a number from zero to ten, where a zero means the [...]