The SUS is a well-established 10-question survey administered at the end of a user test; it gives you a measure of the perceived usability of your product and enables you to compare it with others.
Usability assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. Usability is defined by 5 quality components: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction.
3 methods for cheap and fast UX work are still good advice to emphasize iterative design and accelerate UX maturity improvements (This was Jakob Nielsen's keynote at the in-person Washington DC UX Conference)
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.
The only realistic design strategy is to cater to the actual people who use your product, instead of designing for an idealized super-user who knows more and is more motivated than the real audience.
UX design must make all elements of the interaction understandable and explicit. Mystifying things to entice more clicks from users will only result in dissatisfied customers.
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.
10 things you should do when running a usability study. Remembering all the steps leads to good research insights. (The second of 2 videos on usability study checklists.)
10 things you should do *before* you actually run a usability study. Good planning leads to good research insights. (The first of 2 videos on usability study checklists.)
The recommended sample size (the number of study participants) is very different for qualitative user testing (small N) and for quantitative research (big N). Here's why the recommendations differ.
Polyhierarchy is used to place a single item in more than one IA category. This can support users with different mental models but should be used judiciously.
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.
Both UX research techniques help you gain quantitative insight into user behavior. Each method provides different types of information and can answer different kinds of research questions, however.
Test early and often is a key recommendation for UX research. Dora Brune shares her approach, including regular Open Test Labs to engage more product teams and make user research more agile. Kinder Eggs make for a nice warmup task, even in remote tests. (Recorded at a participant panel at the UX Conference.)
Usability studies with international users can be very informative, but if you don't speak the foreign language, you will need interpretation to understand the user (and for the user to understand you). These 5 guidelines will improve the value of translated research sessions.
Two user research methods allow you to quickly test a large number of design alternatives, thus accelerating UX innovation. Rapid iterative design and within-subjects testing of multiple alternate designs aren't for every project but are great when they do apply.
Some business stakeholders say that 5 test users can't represent all customers, and so it's too dangerous to release a new design. Better to keep existing workflows unchanged. How to respond to such claims.
User research, especially for complex apps and domain-specific design, may require study participants with high expertise who can be difficult to recruit. Here are 5 tips for getting expert users.
Improve design decisions by looking at the problem from multiple points of view: combine multiple types of data or data from several UX research methods.
