Hot answers tagged usability-study
95
Make sure that you focus on goals.
Don't ask what your users want or need in terms of functionality or form. Find out what they need (or want) to achieve .. that way the parameters you use to define and solve the problem will be much clearer and focused.
Questions to ask your users might run along the lines of;
what they need to achieve.
how they ...
54
Ultimately it's probably not a good idea to go down this path without serious testing because of user expectation based around existing conventions.
That's an important point, because what I'm taking away from your description is that this is currently untested and you designed this UI under the assumption that your users would understand. This is generally ...
29
I had a customer a few years back who had gone through several stages of improvements to the way their system worked.
Initially they managed everything in Excel and it kind of worked, but it started getting a bit bloated and rather out of hand - well you can imagine the problems!
Then they got a team of developers in-house to improve the situation. How? ...
28
Good question. Wikipedia lists intuition as "thoughts and preferences that come to mind quickly and without much reflection" - so basically, saying a UI is intuitive is like saying it exhibits several positive attributes: it's memorable, discoverable, easy to learn, familiar, matches expectation, and so forth. But let's not take my word for it. Let's refer ...
27
At work we have a staff development system that only displays the login button if you are browsing in Firefox. Every time a class is held, our helpdesk receives calls from people who are unable to log in. Every call has to do with the fact that they don't see a login button. We now have to go out of our way to tell the users they have to hit enter to log ...
25
I have come across this exact problem on a project. Everybody on the team is already stretched to the limit to get a product shipped - and it's important to get it out before a particular international event (for example). So a UX review which happens too late in the development life cycle throws up some serious issues which no-one had foreseen. What to do - ...
24
Encapsulated flags are the only solution I've found that reach all edge cases. Pointing the flag at the label rather than the input allows for consistency with radio buttons and check mark groups or weird inputs like sliders or sorters.
Highlighting the field with red is also helpful, but not always possible. Example usages below.
download bmml ...
23
Is your question "Should we go ahead and ship the product with a 17% failure rate?" If so, and if you're sure there are no weird extenuating circumstances that compromised the integrity of the test itself, here are the factors I would weigh:
What does the task failure mean for the user? Is the nature of the task such that a slight inconvenience -- and ...
17
The error message should appear before the form field itself (at a minimum in the markup itself, but ideally visually shown this way on the screen too) so that when someone is reading the form they read that the field has errored before they then read the field in question - that way the user is prepared mentally that "the contents of this field I am about ...
16
I've never thought about exactly WHY we hate stock photos, but I think it's related to the concept of the uncanny valley.
Most cheesy business-centric stock photos look almost real, but there's always just something that makes them clearly unnatural. Is it the perfect mix of skin colors amongst the group? Is it the fact that they seem WAY too happy to be ...
15
I really like Rahul's response, but I will add my own 2 cents. I've grown extremely hesitant to use the Enter key on any Web form due to uncertainty about its default function. I'm just not sure what it's going to do! Some people aren't as careful with their development efforts, and they fail to specify default buttons for a form properly, confusing users ...
15
I'm worried that perhaps your question is flawed. You are looking for a general answer like, "the faceted search pattern is always going to be more intuitive than the search suggestions pattern," but any answer like that would ignore the most crucial factor: audience. Intuition, and therefore intuitiveness, is a human thing, not a design thing. In a sense, ...
14
You are conflating 'subjective' and 'unreliable'. Usability tests aim to get reliable information about people's reactions. Self-reported opinions are also subjective, and are much less reliable indicators of how other people will react to the interface.
If I test 100 people and their subjective opinion is that they hate an interface, I'm pretty sure that ...
14
+1 on "UX starting at day 0".
[Minor caveat that I'm a dev and not a UX person so I might have a bit of a naive understanding of what is done/needs to be done from a UX perspective].
I have worked on Agile teams where UX folks were an integral part of the team and a few things that seemed to work well:
Early UX involvement
Often our interaction ...
13
For the 'input lag' part of your question, I still use the rules of thumb found in Nielsen's Usability Engineering:
The basic advice regarding response times has been about the same time for many years [Miller 1968; Card et al. 1991]:
0.1 second is about the time limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously
1.0 ...
12
US Department of Defense Design Criteria Standard - Human Engineering MIL-STD 1472F Section 5.14.9 and Table XXII requires that "Sketching" have a response time of 0.2 seconds "from input of point to display of line." That's a minimum standard of performance, so it should correspond to your worse-case conditions.
Like a lot of standards, I believe much of ...
12
I refer to it as social desirability response bias or acquiescence bias
Id start at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_desirability_bias and explore from there to find some relevant research you could cite
You know I mentioned in my earlier comment - that this is like Pandora's box, and here's a page on wikipedia that supports that statement, just take a ...
12
Dan Zarella is frequently quoted by HubSpot and other Internet Marketers because of his careful study of Marketing Statistics. The second link has the most direct answers to what you are looking for:
3 Steps to Picking the Perfect Number of Landing Page Form Fields
Which Types of of Form Fields Lower Landing Page Conversions (awesome)
Landing Page Best ...
12
It depends on the application itself. Is it in a formal context the language and instructions should be formal. Most users would not trust a Bank or Government who said: "Dude, you didn't get your social security number right. Please enter a correct one". It's an extreme case, I know. On the other hand, some user would maybe like the favourite online T-shirt ...
12
I've come across this before and the following image illustrates just part of the problem:
I've found that one way to find out what a user actually needs is to really understand the user's requirements, to the point where you can put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself "What would I need in this position?"*
The other thing I've found that helps is ...
11
It seems you're already marking optional form fields instad of required ones. There seem to be no 'required' indicators, but no 'optional'-indicators, too, so I wanted to mention that.
What I like to do on forms is to "micro-gamify" them: For every field in the form provide a "validation-indicator". For simplicity, let's say it's just a small circle. This ...
9
In general, SUS seems to be okay for web sites. Tullis and Stetson compared it with other usability surveys in assessing a corporate intranet, and SUS outperformed the others.
It sounds like a couple certain individual items may not be applicable for your work. To check for this systematically, create a correlation matrix of your item responses and ...
9
They can be quite different. Off the top of my head:
Intranet users can use certain information elements a lot - and will want to be able to 'sort' the interface so they can quickly get at the bits they use regularly
Intranets can be vast & also dumping grounds for data which people will add - but then never get around to removing when its out of ...
9
You aren't as likely to discover their needs by analyzing their reactions to something that you've built. I agree with codeinthehole - research that independently of your ideas.
Some questions that might be helpful:
What's a random day in their life like? When / where do they use tools similar to yours?
What do they need to know beforehand in order to ...
9
The main reason for that, IMO, is if the user is logging in from a location that is not necessarily their home or normal one - public computer, friends house, etc.
By not "remembering me" I signify that I don't want the site to remember my username making it easier for someone to guess my user ID and pass.
Yes, I should log out, but what if I forget? ...
9
So, how do you define the minimum value?
Tuftes’ data density is really about three principles: (1) Above all else, show the data, (2) Maximize the data-ink ratio and (3) Erase non-data ink. In its extreme this could be interpreted as small as possible human could read. We’re talking about font-sizes as small as 3 pixels, but practically 5 pixels which ...
8
In usability tests I tend to produce an outline document of the timeline of the test before we start - so I can just note down what's happening in the right "chunk" of the timeline without having to note down the stage of the test or time. If space allows I sometimes do multiple users on the same paper - using different coloured pens for each. Makes it easy ...
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