Kate Moranis a former NN/G employee who worked on research, teaching, leadership, and design thought leadership. Her expertise spanned both qualitative and quantitative research methods. At NN/G Kate discovered and published ground-breaking findings on artificial intelligence (AI), interaction design, digital content, and information-seeking user behaviors.
Answer two questions to decide how to handle technical terminology in your writing: (1) How many readers will know this term? (2) How important is the term in your context?
Facilitation experts demonstrate how to prepare a participant for the test session. Use a facilitator’s script to help remember the important information that participants need to know.
Even when you want to test a specific feature, start with broader tasks to capture natural user behavior and observe what participants would do on their own. If they fail, follow up with directed tasks.
User interfaces can definitely be too hard to use, but can they be too easy? No, users never complain about an easy design, even if they would have been able to use something more difficult.
Members of a design team will often argue for different solutions to a UI problem. That's when to say "show me the data" to resolve the debate by empirical insights, rather than who argues the best.
User interface elements that share one or more traits (such as shape, color, size, etc.) will be seen by users as being similar and belonging together.
Qualitative user research aims at insights, not numbers. Metrics for individual users help tell the story of how each person did, but mean values across a small sample won't be reliable.
