Research Methods Articles & Videos

  • Technology Transfer of Heuristic Evaluation and Usability Inspection

    Participants in a course on usability inspection methods were surveyed 7-8 months after the course. Factors which influenced adoption were cost, rated benefit of the method, relevance to current projects, and whether the methods had active evangelists.

  • Usability Testing for the 1995 Sun Microsystems' Website

    Paper prototyping, card sorting, and traditional usability testing were all employed to guide the design of the 1995 Sun Microsystems' Web site.

  • Overview of the 1995 Design of Sun Microsystems' Website, Using Iterative Design and User Testing

    Extensive usability testing was conducted to guide the 1995 Sun Microsystems' Web site design. This series of articles describes in detail the methods and findings of the design team.

  • Characteristics of Usability Problems Found by Heuristic Evaluation

    Heuristic evaluation is a good method of identifying both major and minor problems with an interface, but the lists of usability problems found by heuristic evaluation will tend to be dominated by minor problems, which is one reason severity ratings form a useful supplement to the method.

  • Summary of Usability Inspection Methods

    Usability inspection is the generic name for a set of methods that are all based on having evaluators inspect a user interface. Typically, usability inspection is aimed at finding usability problems in the design, though some methods also address issues like the severity of the usability problems and the overall usability of an entire system.

  • Severity Ratings for Usability Problems

    Rating usability problems according to their severity facilitates the allocation of resources to fix the most serious problems. Severity ratings are a combination of frequency, impact, and persistence.

  • Usability Laboratories: A 1994 Survey

    A summary of statistics for 13 usability laboratories in 1994, an introduction to the main uses of usability laboratories in usability engineering, and survey of some of the issues related to practical use of user testing and computer-aided usability engineering.

  • Goal Composition: Extending Task Analysis to Predict Things People May Want to Do

    This essay describes a technique for extending a task analysis based on the principle of goal composition. Basically, goal composition starts by considering each primary goal that the user may have when using the system. A list of possible additional features is then generated by combining each of these goals with a set of general meta-goals that extend the primary goals.