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Posts Tagged ‘usability testing’

UX Testing: Low- or High-Fidelity Mockups?

When it comes to music, most of us have an idea about low and high fidelity. Low fidelity is the radio in your grandfather’s station wagon. You get the idea of the sound, and in the ‘70s, that’s about all you had to work with. High fidelity is the car next to you at the […]

UX Testing: Employees or No Employees?

Recruiting real end users can be costly and time consuming for usability testing. For anyone but a user experience (UX) purist, the temptation to use employees for usability testing can be quite a temptation. Employees are accessible and already paid for, so why not use them? After all, they are users outside of work. So, […]

Differences Between Usability Testing & User Acceptance Testing

Are usability testing and user acceptance testing (UAT) the same? Some people in the past have told me “yes,” because they are both about the user. My guess is that people who aren’t familiar with UAT see the word “user” and assume it means the “real-life” user. I don’t know who came up with the […]

The Sequence of Tasks Makes a Big Difference in UX Testing

Have you ever put your jacket on before your shirt? How did that go? The sequence of your routine tasks can make a big difference. Have you ever thought the answer to a question was obvious because of the questions that came before it? People are conscious of the sequence of how things happen. Hearing […]

Pilot Testing Your Surveys is Not About Getting a License to Fly

It’s about not crashing the plane. “Wow, I certainly missed that one” is not what you want to say at the end of a research project that crashed into the ground. In the process of developing usability tests or surveys, we can become experts about what users think, or so we believe. For this post, […]

How Much “User” Should Be in Your User Experience Research?

To put it in a Google Analytics perspective, what should your sample size be? How much should end-users be involved in the user experience research process? To understand what is going on with your home page, would you only analyze user data from a Monday on a holiday weekend from 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm? […]

What Google Doesn’t Know About Your Website

Usability testing is not what Google Analytics is designed for. What if you could get your customers to tell you whether they would use what you are developing before you spend resources developing it?  What if your customers could tell you what to change or not change before you start making changes?  Henry Ford’s ‘faster […]

Apolitical Tech Lessons from the Healthcare.gov Meltdown

When Healthcare.gov launched, it drew an understandably high number of initial users. Millions poured onto the site, but they weren’t able to sign up for insurance due to technical glitches. As an impartial observer, it was interesting to watch media outlets struggle to find even one person that was able to sign up successfully. The […]

Accessibility tips

I recently listened to an interview with accessibility expert Derek Featherstone. He provided some of the following practical and valuable tips for Web accessibility. A site designed to conform to good usability, copywriting, and Web standards goes a long way to making a site accessible. Things like using the proper heading structure (H1 on every page, […]