Comprises multiple methods for gaining insight into user needs and behaviours from real end users.
98
votes
16answers
4k views
How to discover what users NEED and not what they WANT?
I have been thinking a lot about my favorite quote from Henry Ford:
If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'Faster Horses'. -Henry Ford
The trouble I have been having is that ...
23
votes
15answers
1k views
Should personal data be asked at the beginning or end of an online survey
Given a 10-step online survey (mostly yes/no radio buttons), where is it best to ask for the users' personal data e.g. name, age, contact details?
My intuition says putting it at the end will yield ...
21
votes
4answers
703 views
Display comments order - best practice
I wonder what is the best comments order on the website. I assume there are two major methods to display comments:
from newest to oldest,
from oldest to newest.
Facebook uses method one and ...
14
votes
4answers
2k views
What is the ROI of UI or UX design?
I was trying to find out if there have been studies on how much a bad UI or UX design affects sales on websites? I couldn't really find anything in my searches.
Also, does anyone know about any ...
13
votes
13answers
290 views
Is user testing a luxury or a necessity?
I understand that you should be thinking of your users all the time but given the current climate where every pound counts is user testing just for the richer companies?? Should you discount your ...
13
votes
6answers
279 views
Should usability testing of a competitor's website be a part of your usability testing routine?
I was reading up on best practices on usability testing for websites and a recommendation was that get your participants to do usability testing on your competitors website as well as that would help ...
13
votes
5answers
339 views
What ways to conduct user research quickly and cheaply are there?
Let's face it, in today's world - everything is moving fast and with approaches like agile, UX gets squeezed. It doesn't have to be this way and from what I hear many companies are using Sprint 0 ...
12
votes
4answers
392 views
A/B Testing Technique
My friend and I were having a discussion about different ways of A/B testing. His technique was to make a single small change (e.g. changing the colour of a button) and then perform A/B Testing to see ...
12
votes
4answers
606 views
What evidence is there that users lose interest after 7 seconds?
'7 seconds' is often trotted out as the maximum amount of time you get to impress someone when they land on your website. Where does this figure come from, and has the rule ever been proven?
Edit: ...
11
votes
3answers
401 views
Should I ask for demographic information in a survey at the end or beginning? [duplicate]
I'm conducting a survey, and will ask for demographic information, e.g., gender, age, level of education, frequency of computer use. Should I ask users for this information at the beginning of the ...
10
votes
5answers
321 views
Should printed graphics of a domain start with www, uppercase/lowercase? How to make the user understand that it's a domain?
Consider a car used by a company which has "advertising" printed on it regarding the actual company.
How should domains be displayed on such a car? Is there any research regarding this? With a wide ...
10
votes
4answers
683 views
How to recruit user test participants?
Where do you find participants for user tests and interviews for persona building? Is it OK to recruit them via an existing web site for example? How much do you pay them?
10
votes
3answers
307 views
What to do when client can't afford user research?
I feel most experts would agree with me when I say "User research is king". You can't know how your users will react to a product until you ask them.
That said, some clients are on tighter budgets ...
10
votes
2answers
675 views
How Do I Collect UX Requirements for the System in Agile Development Environment?
I am starting working on project planning application, which the client wants to develop using the agile model. I want to understand how can i take the requirements and convert them to the usual UX ...
9
votes
6answers
988 views
Floppy disk icon for “Save” [closed]
It's funny that we still use floppy disks icon for save operation association while floppies have long been outdated, unused and many computer users nowadays don't even know how floppy disks actually ...
9
votes
4answers
272 views
How to set up an observation room
I'm going to do user testing (usability testing, like Steve Krug does).
I want :
my co-workers to listen/watch the test live, while I'm doing it, in a
seperate room.
to record the screen and ...
9
votes
2answers
218 views
How to conduct user research in a highly constrained environment with private/protected data?
I work in health care and am trying to establish some practices and protocols for conducting user research on physicians. However, the health care industry has some constraints that make user research ...
9
votes
3answers
124 views
How can I structure a usability study to produce findings that relate to the long-term use of a tool by an expert user?
I am building a tool that will be used in a call center. The users range from part-time temps to 5 year veterans. I have personas that reflect these.
I have two (quite different) prototypes of a ...
9
votes
3answers
213 views
What other option do I have when my target users are not willing to participate in user research?
Has any of you had experiences where you are trying to design for a very specific user group, but had a hard time conducting any kind of user research because the users are not willing to participate? ...
8
votes
7answers
203 views
When to use data driven personas and when to make them up?
I'm studying HCI and the focus for persona creation on my course is resolutely that personas should be derived from user research data. I also attended adaptive path's uxintensive last year and the ...
8
votes
6answers
311 views
How can I make these links more obvious to click on?
I'm working on a website redesign for a dental laboratory.
While testing the home page with a user, they never clicked on the links in the subnavigation. They clicked on the larger buttons in the ...
8
votes
2answers
856 views
What research methods can I use to create personas?
My experience with personas has been from creating personas with data that already exists usually provided by the marketing team based on their research.
How do you go about conducting research to ...
8
votes
2answers
180 views
Has user testing ever revealed that you have to change your app's UI colour?
Dark-themed UI colours have been popular for a while on certain desktop applications (Adobe Lightroom as an example), and seem to be popping up on mobile applications as well. I'm referring to the ...
7
votes
5answers
212 views
Metrics for measuring user engagement for web applications
Unlike business and e-commerce sites, web applications don't necessarily have an end-goal or target for users to achieve. What are some metrics that can be used to measure how 'engaged' users are with ...
7
votes
7answers
722 views
How to measure self reported computer proficiency? Ideally with one item
For a usability test, I'd like to have a simple measure for computer proficiency, to be able to see, whether it has an impact on successfully handling the tasks.
How can we best measure that?
A ...
7
votes
3answers
291 views
How to sell people on the benefits of user research?
I work for a small team right now that is going through a requirements tornado. I know that the reason why is that they have no idea what their users want. They haven't done contextual interviews, ...
7
votes
3answers
250 views
How to document user interviews
What are the best practices to document interviews with users - do you just document the conclusions and take aways or do you do a full transcript or both?
6
votes
1answer
173 views
A/B testing a site with low traffic
I've always been very interested in A/B testing, but have never had the opportunity to implement it on any websites.
I work at a digital agency where the main reason why we haven't been able to ...
6
votes
2answers
111 views
How to use paper prototyping on an existing product
Paper prototyping is a very powerful tool early on in a new product build as it helps you to iron out ux and rapidly iterate.
However if you're working on an existing product and want to test small ...
6
votes
2answers
225 views
User Experience Research on Users Total Digital Environment?
When we do User Experience Research we test a single application or even a single feature of an application. But there are no users who only uses one application. Users today are using several ...
5
votes
5answers
458 views
How reliable are heatmaps generated by cursor positions?
Heatmaps are one of the best tools we have to mesure the impact of a design, not just in UX terms but also in marketing/conversion terms.
I've found that most of the free or less-expensive solutions ...
5
votes
4answers
524 views
Placement of Buttons in Touch Screen Scenario
I am working on a Mobile Application primarily for Android Platform. The Application will have a lot of screens which will take user input and we need to have a save and cancel button for them.
...
5
votes
2answers
183 views
Is domain name important for user experience?
Is it important for the domain of a website to be chosen so that it is simple to type?
For example, consider delicious-dot-ly (delicious.ly).
Would it be fair to say that the difficulty of typing ...
5
votes
5answers
698 views
How to solve Design/UX problems using more tangible/fun techniques?
I am trying to compile a list of interesting/more tangible methods of solving UX/Creative problems - whether it be as individual, in small groups, workshops, in user testing etc...
I am already ...
5
votes
4answers
255 views
Is it effective to ask users which design they prefer and why?
I have a few different options for the UX of a tool. Each is quite different from the other.
They are currently represented as lo-fi wireframes. I would like to get feedback on them to decide which ...
5
votes
2answers
293 views
How do you handle not being allowed to do stakeholder interviews?
I was recently hired for one of my first new projects and have been interviewing stakeholders. I got through the interviews with other people who work for the client, with no problems. However, the ...
5
votes
2answers
189 views
Personas: Do you study current users, potential users, or both?
From my understanding of personas, one of the main purposes is to find out how your users behave and what their mental models of the system might be. I had always thought that, like in usability ...
5
votes
7answers
385 views
What one book should I read to learn more about user research methods? [closed]
I am looking for a book that specifically focuses on the research phase of UX. Specifically the different methods available, when to use them and how to conduct them. What should I buy?
5
votes
2answers
147 views
Help user develop a mental model for version control system
We are developing an integrated version control system for a large enterprise application. When users change something to the underlying data in the system they do so through a "Work Item"
This is ...
5
votes
1answer
372 views
Is there a generally accepted template for user requirements on a UX design project?
In one of my projects, user surveys are about to complete and my next tasks are creating the personas and generating the user requirements document. Since this is one of my first UX projects, my ...
5
votes
1answer
226 views
What is a good tool for mouse tracking? [closed]
I would like to be able to track user activity on an HTML page.
What I want to achieve is the following, a breakdown of user activity per page, and a total time spent on the entire flow.
The ...
5
votes
1answer
182 views
UX of background advertising (or other options)
My company's users use a website that features advertising from specific sponsors. The ads are all directly related to the content of the page and the situation in which the user is viewing the page ...
5
votes
1answer
115 views
Where can I find statistics on the use of mobile app features?
I am looking for academic research that investigates how frequently Set as wallpaper and Delete functions are used in image viewer applications on mobile devices (to defend their inclusion in a list ...
4
votes
3answers
280 views
“Here will be your logo” - any idea how to visually represent this to a client on a demo website?
"Here will be your logo" - any idea how to visually represent this to a client on a demo website?
We are a company offering free demo of client's website, before going for a deal.
Although, the ...
4
votes
4answers
210 views
Navigation with or without sub-navigation?
Considering following site architecture, where each category has multiple products inside it:
/Home
/About
/Products/Category 1
/Products/Category 2
/Products/Category 3
/Products/Category 4
...
4
votes
4answers
177 views
Banner Blindness on Non-Profit Web Site With Zero Ads
I am currently considering a page structure that would include a video.
The context of the page is it is a kind of landing page meant to provide access to informational and educational materials ...
4
votes
2answers
129 views
What's the best way to navigate from between two screens in an App?
What's the best way to navigate from between two screens in an App?
I'm writing an app which essentially consists of 2 screens of content, each displaying different type of news. I'm having a really ...
4
votes
2answers
91 views
Can SUS scores be used for comparison between different systems?
The System Usability Scale (SUS) resulted score seem to me as somewhat subjective. What ever score yields from a questionnaire for System A may just solely be just for System A, and is difficult to ...
4
votes
3answers
151 views
How to wireframe an efficient UI when the project manager refuses to spend time to conduct user research?
I often have to face this situation. I'm asked to wireframe UIs without having any information about the final users (their profiles, needs, preferences, and key tasks).
First, I usually study ...
4
votes
3answers
143 views
Cameras for Paper Prototyping
I help manage a small usability lab. One of the things we're trying to is to record paper prototyping sessions - with a user sitting at a table and a camera directly overhead (from a height of about ...
