In this week’s UIEtips, we look back at a past article where I discuss several different user research strategies and the profound impact they can have on your products. Here’s an excerpt from the article: “Damn, I wish we’d done this a year ago.” That’s what I hear right after I’ve started a team on [...]

In this week’s UIEtips, I speak with Cyd Harrell on conducting user research on mobile devices. Here’s an excerpt from the article Jared: Does mobile usability testing require a lot of hardware? Cyd: It can. I think there’s a bit of a perception that it requires more than it actually does. If we’re going with [...]

Yesterday, a couple of hundred of my favorite UX folks tuned in to my UIE Virtual Seminar while I talked about the ways to use the Kano Model as the basis of a winning UX strategy. During the talk, I referenced a bunch of things, so here’s the list: Understanding the Kano Model – A [...]

The other day, I wrote about how choosing the right words in your tasks makes a critical difference to the outcome of your user research. Mike Pauley wrote a comment, asking how to make sure you’ve got the right words: Great timing on this, as I am dealing with the same issue with a test [...]

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 [...]

Dashboards are a great idea. The problem is, many are useless. In this seminar, Hagan Rivers will show you which elements to include, how to structure them, and what to slash out of your existing dashboard that needs some UX TLC. She’ll show you a bunch of dashboards. And she’ll give you tips for helping [...]

Hang around me long enough and you’ll hear me say this: Outsourcing your user research work is like outsourcing your vacation. It gets the job done, but probably won’t have the effects you were seeking. I usually say this when someone is asking me to do their user research for them. This is something we [...]

Over at the Boxes and Arrows LinkedIn discussion group, Carrie asked: What is a good success rate for a usability test task? We just conducted user testing on a site map. So we have success rate percentages for each task. They range from 9% – 51% success (in up to 3 tries). Obviously there are [...]

You’re going to want your entire team to see our next UIE Virtual Seminar on Thursday, July 21, UX Design when Time, Money, and Support is Limited with Cennydd Bowles. In this 90-minute online seminar, Cennydd will show you: Ways to tailor your UX design process to the culture of your organization How to conduct [...]

30 years ago, I conducted my first usability study. The lab we had— the first ever built for this purpose— was the size of a janitor’s closet (because it was a converted janitor’s closet) and was packed with more than $20,000 of video equipment (because that’s what a simple camera and editing system cost then). [...]