Articles

Alita Kendrick

Alita Kendrick is a mixed-methods Senior UX Researcher specializing in strategic research for AI and applied machine learning.

Articles and Videos

  • Survey Response Biases in User Research

    Users' answers to survey questions are often biased and not the literal truth. Examples include acquiescence bias, social desirability bias, and recency bias. Knowing about response biases will help you interpret survey data with more validity for any design decisions based on the findings.

  • Open vs. Closed Questions in User Research

    When doing user research for a UX design project, we can ask questions in two ways: open-ended (no fixed set of response options) and close-ended (users are restricted to picking from a few answers). Both work well, but only for those research questions they are suited to answer.

  • Service Blueprinting: Top Questions Answered

    Service blueprints are the primary tool for service design, but practitioners often misunderstand how they relate to journey mapping, who should be involved in the process, and how to sell their value to the organization.

  • How to Measure Learnability of a User Interface

    To measure learnability, determine your metric, gather your data, and plot the averages on a line curve. Analyze the learning curve by looking at its slope and its plateau.

  • Service Blueprinting in Practice: Who, When, What

    UX practitioners associate the term “service blueprinting” with an artifact, framework, or collaborative tool. Those surveyed used service blueprints early on or near the end of the product-design lifecycle.

  • Why Service Design

    A service design perspective is needed to avoid fragmenting the long-term customer experience by individual (but uncoordinated) touchpoints, provided by siloed internal teams.

  • Incentives for Participants in UX Research

    Tips for deciding between monetary and nonmonetary incentives for people recruited as test users in usability studies and other UX research.

  • Prototypes vs. Wireframes in UX Projects

    An overview of the similarities and differences between user-interface wireframes and prototypes, as well as the audiences that are best suited for each.

  • Usability Heuristic 2: Match Between the System and the Real World

    No. 2 of the top 10 UX design heuristics is to speak the users' language, use terms familiar to the user, follow real-world conventions, and make information appear in a natural and logical order; all in the interest of achieving a match between the system and the real world.

  • Formative vs. Summative Evaluations

    Formative evaluations are used in an iterative process to make improvements before production. Summative evaluations are used to evaluate a shipped product in comparison to a benchmark.