Even the best of plans can go awry. We role play in our head how a usability test will proceed, understand the objectives at hand, and do a rigorous job of screening the participants. But what do you do when something totally unexpected occurs? Life circumstances among the participants can throw a curve ball at [...]

Today’s UIEtips article will upset a lot of folks. They won’t like what our research has turned up. They’ll claim we’ve got it all wrong. And they might be right. Yet we have data — lots of it. And that data is very clear. If you choose to believe the data, there’s something big that [...]

Nothing reminds me more about the power of what we can do with our data than this TED video of PatientsLikeMe‘s Jamie Haywood, talking about how they change people’s lives with incredible data visualization tools: Here he tells the story of his brother and how it inspired him to look into the data of 45,000 [...]

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 [...]

What is Seductive Interaction Design? More and more, we’re seeing web sites use rewards systems, competitions, and fun progress indicators to get people engaged. Interactions such as these trigger different elements of human behavior and encourage your visitors to engage with your web site more. They differentiate the casual glance from a longer involvement 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 [...]