Posts Tagged ‘user research’

At the end of the third day of SxSW, I sat in on a session about Behavior Change and how design can use that as a value proposition. Chris Risdon, of Adaptive Path, was the speaker, and it was great to sit in on this topic again and see how much it’s matured since the […]

I am a lifelong fan of LEGO© toys and games and of J.R.R. Tolkien. So when LEGO began to release The Lord of the Rings sets, I was delighted. I then came across this video about designing Shelob™ Attacks while reviewing the new sets: As a user experience researcher and designer, I enjoy learning about […]

Since my last post about making emotional response part of the design process and a defined focus of research, I’ve been wondering how you help make user responses, not just success, matter to a design and development team and get them to focus on it. One idea I came up with is user response bingo.

We’ve all been there: A new technology emerges (cough Responsive Web Design cough), all shiny and spiffy. We get excited about it – tweet and blog our way around it for months – until our excitement and the sheer saturation from the community spills out into the wider business community. And at a certain point, […]

It’s something many folks in my profession struggle with—explaining to other people exactly what we do. When people I don’t really know (like my father’s poker buddy, my tailor, the lady making polite chit-chat while she bags my groceries…) ask me what I do, I respond, “I help build websites.” It’s simple. People understand it. […]

Personas are incredibly helpful at informing project teams because they are powerful mnemonics for large amounts of data. They combine our ability to perceive and recognize other human faces and our ability to remember stories in a light, accessible document. Personas are based on deep research of the users through interviews, observations, and other reliable […]

Caroline Jarrett’s article “Putting the “Long” into Longitudinal: UX Lessons from Survey Research” shares three insights for UX from the European Survey Research Association conference in July 2011: Try Asking Less, But More Often and Earlier. If you want to learn about users’ engagement with your product over a longer-term experience, might you try asking […]

At UPA 2011, Michael Rawlins, Lori Hawkins, and Jeff Sauro presented about Keystroke Level Modeling (KLM), a tool for estimating the actual movements and the time to perform each step that a particular UI design requires for users to complete a given task. KLM offers a way to analyze the time on task required by a design […]

As a practitioner in the user experience design field, I have a foundational understanding that the way I do or think of things is not necessarily the same as others. It never ceases to amaze and inspire me when I get user feedback on an existing or proposed design and they bring things to the […]

Sliced bread is the innovation by which all innovations are measured:  “the best thing since sliced bread.” That phrase spawns the question: “What was the best thing before sliced bread?” Attempts to answer that question range from humorous to contemplative. I recently discovered another possible answer: User research! “Slice of Life” in the April 2011 […]