Our good friend, Dana Chisnell, wrote a fabulous answer on Quora, sharing her tips on recruiting participants for user research: Do the recruiting yourself. This gives you bonus research data about your people, and you may learn things you hadn’t anticipated that will influence how you conduct the study. It also starts a relationship with [...]

Here’s one way to try to get married: Go to a singles’ bar, walk up to every eligible candidate, stick out your hand, and ask, “Will you marry me?” Visit enough bars, talk to enough potential spouses, and, eventually, someone will say yes. At least that’s the theory behind the method. Interestingly, many web-based applications [...]

The search log, an often over-looked part of our site analytics, can offer a wealth of great information about how people interact with our design. We know, for example, that users often search for a keyword they don’t find on the screen, in essence creating their own link. Inspecting the search log can tell us [...]

We tell our clients this constantly: the organizations who are most successful are the ones who are on intimate terms with how and why their customers use their product. But how? To answer that question, we invited our friend Steve Portigal to host a UIE Virtual Seminar recently on the topic of interviewing. In this podcast we revisit the topic and answer several remaining questions from his seminar.

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 [...]

Your organization spends considerable resources to get people to come to your site. Does your site do what it needs to once they get there? Your users’ experience is a fluid event that frequently starts someplace like Google and, if you’re lucky, ends with them accomplishing their objective at your site. The goal is to [...]

User experience research lives or dies by the appropriateness of the participants in the study. If the participants match the real users, you’re set. We held a Virtual Seminar with Dana Chisnell to discuss recruiting for usability testing, and this is the followup podcast to that seminar. In the podcast, Dana answers remaining questions from the seminar.

A few weeks back we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Pete Bell and Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca. These guys are the experts we go to when talking about designing for facets. As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so I got together with Pete and Daniel to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

User research is now a critical tool in the toolbox of design teams. However, it only works well if you involve the right participants in the study. Having the participants that match the design’s audience will give the team feedback on what works well and where the design needs rethinking. By learning from the participants, the team [...]

In our next UIE Virtual Seminar, Wednesday, September 9 (09/09/09!), Bill DeRouchey shows you examples of how to tackle this question – What is the essence of your product? Interaction with a product is more than how it’s used or how it behaves. It’s about a connection between two sides. One side is the customer, [...]