Personas and archetypes are different ways of communicating the same user research data. Archetypes describe categories of users; personas humanize those categories to illustrate real impact.
The Hawthorne effect is a phenomenon where people change their behavior because they know they are being observed. Here are 5 guidelines for mitigating the Hawthorne effect in user research.
The easier designs are to use, the less users tend to think about the work that went into making them that way. We know good designs are largely the result of your careful efforts — thank you.
Basic psychological principles can guide you as a UX designer because most users share many common characteristics. Consider learning more about: motivation, attention, memory, persuasion, learning, decision making, emotion, sensation, perception, or cognitive biases.
Ecommerce user experience can benefit from community features. Our user research in China finds that shoppers often view such content as more credible and useful than brand content.
Users don't work hard enough to discover how to use your design in the intended manner. Bad user! But really, they're just prioritizing their own time and interests and behaving the way evolution made people.
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.
Directed user research where you ask people closed-end questions can bias the outcome in favor of those things that are being asked about. Unguided studies are often better at revealing true user preferences.
People react user experience at 3 levels of emotional processing, as defined by Don Norman: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. Understanding these different levels is important for better UX design.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to preferentially seek out or believe data that confirms your expectations. For example, thinking that one part of the UI is well designed and another is bad, might you give more weight to observations of usability test participants having trouble with that second feature.
Humans have a deep need for autonomy, relatedness, and competency in their life. Catering to these needs in UX design can drastically increase user satisfaction.
The reciprocity principle states that people, when given something upfront, tend to feel a sense of obligation to repay what has been provided. Login walls reverse this sequence and require users to disclose personal info before allowing access to content. People often resent this, and may not be as forthcoming or cooperative as a result.
It's frustrating for users to go back-and-forth and back-and-forth to the same web page, bouncing around without getting what they need. Analytics data can help identify pages that don't help users progress.
When users search for information, they don't always keep looking for the best solution. In our eyetracking studies 20% of the time, users make do with the first result and don't look any further.
Extensive user research with people shopping online identified 5 main types of behavior: product-focused, browsing, researchers, bargain-hunters, and one-time shoppers. Each user type benefits from different UX elements.
