CategoryUser Research

January 8, 2013 — If you’ve ever run a usability test before, you’ll know that it’s not as easy as it looks. In this article Damian Rees shares some of the lessons he has learned which should help you avoid your user test turning into a frustrating experience for you or the test participant. Read more…

October 10, 2012 — Lean UX is an approach that quickly followed the lean startup movement. It is not a new thing. It’s just a new name for things that were always around. This article takes the principles of the lean startup and suggests their UX research equivalents. Read more…

September 4, 2012 — Christian Holst goes over some interesting stats he found when benchmarking the top 100 grossing e-commerce websites’ checkout processes. In this post, Holst explains each of them and shows you some real life implementations of do’s and don’ts when it comes to checkout processes. Read more…

May 16, 2012 — In my nearly two decades as an information architect, I’ve seen my clients flush away millions upon millions of dollars on worthless, pointless, “fix it once and for all” website redesigns. All types of organizations are guilty: large government agencies, Fortune 500s, not-for-profits and (especially) institutions of higher education. Read more…

February 6, 2012 — When conducting user research, we all know that asking the right questions is just as important as how you ask them, but how do you know exactly what questions to ask? What if the discussion topic is very personal? How do you get a complete stranger to open up? There is a better way to conduct an in-depth interview, and it doesn’t involve a clipboard. Just imagine what you could discover if the participant’s answers weren’t limited to a predetermined set of questions. This is where collaging can help. Read more…

January 26, 2012 — UX practitioners, both consultants and in house, sometimes conduct research. Be it usability testing or user research with a generative goal, research requires planning. To make sure product managers, developers, marketers and executives (let’s call them stakeholders) act on UX research results, planning must be crystal clear, collaborative, fast and digestible. Long plans or no plans don’t work for people. Read more…

December 6, 2011 — Ah, the love of a client. That is indeed what we all seek as professionals, is it not? If we lived in a utopia, then that’s all there would be. Openness. Honesty. Passion. Flowing in both directions, client to service provider and vice versa. We want our clients to be right behind us in our ideas and open to new ones. In order for this to happen, there has to be trust. Read more…

October 4, 2011 — Improving your forms, 404 pages and error messages will improve your website’s overall user experience. In this article, Lara Swanson walks you through how to add error tracking using Google Analytics, and how to assemble the data and analyze it. Read more…

September 20, 2011 — If you use them correctly, metrics can vastly improve design and make you an even better designer. In this article, Laura Klein talks about some specific tools to get the most out of them. Read more…

September 2, 2011 — The entire process of designing digital applications comes with many challenges and decisions. For the majority of projects, you will be designing in somewhat familiar territory. Read more…