There are many different techniques and methods that can be used in UX research, design and testing. Where to go if you want an overview of techniques, for exploring new methods, or for reference? Some resources are: The methods section of the Usability body of knowledge. It presents benefits, disadvantages, descriptions, and links to further …
Category Archives: methods
Getting more information from a physical card sort
Card sorts are usually used for gathering quantitative data. But they can be valuable as well as a knowledge elicitation technique for qualitative data, especially when you’re working in domains outside your expertise. The main benefit is that in addition to the categories, you get to know a bit more about the criteria that your …
Return on investment for user testing
It is not always easy to quantify what you can gain by a good user experience. Content customers, higher satisfaction, more loyalty, fewer complaints all need to be factored in, and not only in the short term. A great example of the effects that user testing can have is this case study: The $300 Million …
On the number of people required for a usability evaluation
How many people are needed for a usability study? The question comes up time and time again, with different answers. This time, Hwang and Salvendy have tried to answer it by a meta-analysis of the available literature since 1990. As inclusion criteria they used: the usability evaluation was done with one of the methods think-aloud, …
Creating interesting personas with techniques from RPGs
In role playing games, players are faced with the task of creating a role playing character. For good role playing, these characters need a detailed background story. They have a personality, their own wishes, their own quirks and their own appearance. Many tricks exist to get to exciting characters fast. Personas are very much like …
Generalising
Applying results from studies to other contexts is not easy and should always be done with caution. I came across yet another example, this time someone telling that human behavior in lab settings can be very different from human behavior in a natural environment. If one wants to know more about natural behavior, one should …
Click testing
GMI, a company in market research, offers a product for click testing, which according to their claims can be used to ‘[accurately measure] what consumers notice on the [web] page’. Test subjects are shown a couple of pages and are asked for each page to click on the 5 elements that first grab their attention. …