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, [...]

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 [...]

When I presented my suggestion for how to compare multiple design alternatives, one step involved creating what I called a Weighted Differences Matrix. In the matrix, each row represents a difference between the design alternative, which, in turn, we interpret to be a factor to help us decide which design is better. How do we [...]

Last week, I spoke at the Boston IxDA night of Short Talks, where I gave a 10-minute (!) presentation called Case Study: A Discount Approach to Comparing Multiple Design Alternatives. Here’s what the session was described as: What’s the Best Way to Compare Multiple Design Alternatives? Good design practice suggests you create multiple sketches, which [...]

This week, I had the great honor of speaking with Dana Chisnell, noted usability expert and principal at Usability Works, a consultancy based in San Fransisco. Dana is also the co-author of the recently-released second edition of the Handbook of Usability Testing, a book so fine, I agreed to write the foreword.

On April 12, I gave the keynote at the IA Summit. It was my second time keynoting this event and a real honor for me. The audience was great and it lead to some very interesting discussion, both at the conference and on blogs and discussion lists everywhere. I’ve posted the slides above and have [...]

Web-based applications are different from content-based web sites because the users are involved in a transaction. In our work researching the usability of a content-based site, we focus on how users will find and react to the information. However, with web-based applications, there are many other considerations we account for. In this week’s article for [...]