Resources

Bush vs. Kerry: Email Newsletters Rated

Articles and White Papers

When using PC-native file formats such as PDF or spreadsheets, users feel like they're interacting with a PC application. Because users are no longer browsing a website, they shouldn't be given a browser UI.

09/20/04

Formal Usability Reports vs. Quick Findings

Articles and White Papers

Both candidates for president of the United States offer email newsletters with much good content to excite supporters, but miserable subscription interfaces and several other usability problems.

04/25/05

International Sites: Minimum Requirements

Articles and White Papers

Formal reports are the most common way of documenting usability studies, but informal reports are faster to produce and are often a better choice.

08/08/05

Putting A/B Testing in Its Place

Articles and White Papers

Users from other countries have special needs related to entry fields for names and addresses, measurements and dates, and information about regional product standards.

08/15/05

Time Budgets for Usability Sessions

Articles and White Papers

Measuring the live impact of design changes on key business metrics is valuable, but often creates a focus on short-term improvements. This near-term view neglects bigger issues that only qualitative studies can find.

09/12/05

Outliers and Luck in User Performance

Articles and White Papers

Up to 40% of precious testing time is wasted while users engage in nonessential activities. Far better to focus on watching users perform tasks with the target interface design.

03/06/06

Corporate Usability Maturity: Stages 5-8

Articles and White Papers

Six percent of task attempts are extremely slow and constitute outliers in measured user performance. These sad incidents are caused by bad luck that designers can -- and should -- eradicate.

05/01/06

Variability in User Performance

Articles and White Papers

An organization that reaches the managed usability stage still has far to go to reach usability nirvana. Attaining these higher maturity levels requires many years of effort.

05/15/06

Quantitative Studies: How Many Users to Test?

Articles and White Papers

When doing website tasks, the slowest 25% of users take 2.4 times as long as the fastest 25% of users. This difference is much higher than for other types of computer use; only programming shows a greater disparity.

06/26/06

Fast, Cheap, and Good: Yes, You Can Have It All

Articles and White Papers

When collecting usability metrics, testing 20 users typically offers a reasonably tight confidence interval.

01/02/07

Location is Irrelevant for Usability Studies

Articles and White Papers

The sooner you complete a usability study, the higher its impact on the design process. Slower methods should be deferred to an annual usability checkup.

04/30/07

The KJ-Technique: A Group Process for Establishing Priorities

Articles and White Papers

You get the same insights regardless of where you conduct user testing, so there's no reason to test in multiple cities. When a city is dominated by your own industry, however, you should definitely test elsewhere.

05/11/04

Jared M. Spool

Articles and White Papers

In design, our resources are limited. Priorities become a necessity. We need to ensure we are working on the most important parts of the problem. How do we assess what is most important?

02/19/04

Inherent Value Testing

Jared M. Spool

Case Studies and reports

Is your web site chartered with encouraging people to buy or use your product or service? Is it succeeding? It turns out there is a simple usability testing technique that can help you measure how your site communicates your product's inherent value.

02/25/04

Conducting Inherent Value Testing

Jared M. Spool

Articles and White Papers

Inherent Value Testing is a simple usability testing technique that can help you measure how your site communicates your product's value.

02/15/05

Seven Common Usability Testing Mistakes

Jared M. Spool

Articles and White Papers

When a design has a usability problem, it's because someone made a wrong decision. They chose to take the design in a direction that creates frustration for the user. A different design choice would have prevented the frustration.

03/07/06

Interview-Based Tasks: Learning from Leonardo DiCaprio

Jared M. Spool

Articles and White Papers

The silence was deafening. The corporate Vice President of Marketing sat at the head of the table, with the rest of the room populated by the development team. Nobody was saying a word. They were just letting the question just hang in the air: "What did we do wrong?"

01/06/06

Avoid making wrong conclusions from user analysis

Jared M. Spool

Articles and White Papers

According to Jared Spool, many teams rush the process from user observations to design recommendations. They are so anxious to fix things that they end up making the wrong conclusions and fixing the wrong things.

03/25/06

Usability Stockholm Syndrome

Jensen Harris

Articles and White Papers

When Jensen Harris had to conduct his first usability test at Microsoft, he expected that the participants would let out their rage at Microsoft. But it turns out that people tend to be less critical than they probably should be. The participants consider themselves guests in the usability lab, don't want to insult the hosts, and are embarrassed when they can't complete a task.

02/13/06

Practical Usability Testing

Joshua Kaufman

Articles and White Papers

You know you’d have a better site or Web application if you ever got around to usability testing, but the process just seems so daunting and expensive. Columnist Joshua Kaufman returns with a practical guide to conducting your first usability testing session without breaking a sweat—or the bank. Now you have no excuse!

07/02/05

Hotspots and Hyperlinks: Using Eye-tracking to Supplement Usability Testing

Mark C. Russell

Articles and White Papers

This article discusses how eye-tracking can be used to supplement traditional usability test measures. User performance on two usability tasks with three e-commerce websites is described.

10/01/03

Four Words to Improve User Research

Mark Hurst

Articles and White Papers

Suggestions on how to conduct usability testing.

01/28/02

Tests Require Constant Feedback

Matt Hicks

Articles and White Papers

01/01/02

Competitor analysis

Articles and White Papers

01/01/02

User survey for design

Steps and Presentations

01/01/02

Contextual inquiry

Steps and Presentations

01/01/02

Task analysis

Steps and Presentations

01/01/02

Test & Measure

Steps and Presentations

01/01/02

Diagnostic evaluation

Steps and Presentations

01/01/02

Performance testing

Subjective Assessment (testing & post-release)

Steps and Presentations

01/01/02

Critical Incident Technique Analysis

Steps and Presentations

01/01/02

Steps and Presentations

01/01/02

Remote evaluation

Sample size during testing

Steps and Presentations

01/01/02

Cost of User Testing a Website

Steps and Presentations

05/03/98

Testing Whether Web Page Templates are Helpful

Articles and White Papers

05/17/98

Why You Only Need to Test With 5 Users

Articles and White Papers

03/19/00

Success Rate: The Simplest Usability Metric

Articles and White Papers

02/21/01

First Rule of Usability? Don’t Listen to Users

Articles and White Papers

08/05/01

Poor Code Quality Contaminates Users’ Conceptual Models

Articles and White Papers

10/28/01

Goal Composition: Extending Task Analysis to Predict Things People MayWant to Do

Articles and White Papers

01/01/94