A simple method for visually identifying strong vs. weak themes in qualitative data from user research: by placing individual observations in a spreadsheet and color-coding them.
The total customer journey and user experience quality will benefit from considering market research and user research to be highly related, and to integrate the two, instead of keeping different kinds of research teams from collaborating.
Usability studies with children and teenagers are as valuable as any other user research but require special attention to both participant recruiting and study facilitation. You can't act the same with kids as you would with adults.
Remote usability studies can be run completely by software (unmoderated), or a human UX researcher can facilitate the study, even if the test participant is remote (at home or their own office, rather than yours).
Our research shows that tutorials don’t make users faster or more successful at completing tasks; on the contrary, they make them perceive the tasks as more difficult.
When conducting user interviews or running usability studies, don't rush to talk as soon as the user stops speaking. Deliberately staying silent for longer than it feels comfortable will often prod users into saying more.
Qualitative and quantitative methods both have their place in user research, but they address different issues in the UX design process. Understand the differences to pick the right method to learn what you need.
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.
Different user research methods are suited for different stages of the UX design process. Here's an overview of the best methods to discover, explore, test, and listen.
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.
How to conduct user research for systems with confidential or otherwise sensitive data, for example in domains like healthcare or financial services, where it can be problematic to record screens or otherwise share the user's information.
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.
Using paper prototypes is a great way to test a design idea and get usability feedback quickly. You can test whether a layout makes sense to users and make immediate changes if they run into issues.
When conducting research for customer-journey maps, use qualitative methods that allow direct interaction with or observation of users, such as interviews, field studies, and diary studies.
Teens are (over)confident in their web abilities, but they perform worse than adults. Lower reading levels, impatience, and undeveloped research skills reduce teens’ task success and require simple, relatable sites.
Usability testing and other UX evaluation methods can be divided into two major categories: formative evaluation and summative evaluation. Both have their place, but at different stages in the design lifecycle, and they have different characteristics, for example in the number of test participants needed for a good study.
Usability testing is similar to how wild animals hunt for food: we're trying to hunt down the design flaws in the user interface and must optimize a series of studies for total gain, rather than spend too much on any one study.
Children’s cognitive skills are still developing, so their reasoning abilities are weaker than those of adults. To help them successfully use an interface, designs should display clear, specific instructions, leveraging kids’ mental models and prior knowledge.
