20
How can this discrepancy be reconciled?
You have divergent results because the number of participants is small and not representative. There is no randomization or blinding to prevent bias. You're also not calculating the relevant stats. (What are the standard deviation, margin of error, confidence intervals, odds ratios, p values, etc?)
Further, you ...
13
Resolve the behavioral stumbling block
You make a key observation that it's hard to get users to backtrack from a specific suggestion ("I want this button!") that they are psychologically anchored on.
I agree. You can use reason and charm to get a user off a fixation on a specific UX suggestion, but the effort involved in doing that can result in ...
11
How to reconcile the discrepancy? That I can't tell but here is why it might have happened.
The "5 users will find everything wrong with your system" refers to usability problems test subjects will find in your usability tests. Sauro has a great article that goes quite deep in to this "5 users is enough" thingie.
The five user number comes from the ...
10
Similar to: What are good questions to ask when interviewing intranet users for persona development?
I had the same problem and didn't know what to ask users. After some research and thought, I came up with the following:
Guidelines
Use Primarily Open-Ended Questions
Ask Naïve Questions
Ask People to show You, not tell you, when possible
Ask for specific ...
9
This won't fully answer your question since you already included part of the answer in your question :)
For the part where the user (or the client in some cases) insists on "But I WANT a BUTTON", I have some useful techniques:
I re-confirm the user/client problem. I shift him/her from proposing solution to identifying the problem. This may require a lot of ...
9
I've tried to solve this same question in the past. Here's my solution.
Keep it short. Direct them to activities.
Focus the issue with a choice:
"I'm trying to do something that's not currently possible"
OR "I'm doing something and the app isn't doing what I expected"
Ask about activities:
"What were you trying to do when things ...
7
Look at your confidence intervals: the "real" score for v1 is somewhere between 58 and 88, while that score for v2 is somewhere between 51 and 79. Most notably, the confidence interval for each score contains the mean for the other score.
What this is telling you is that your sample size is too small. Based on the data you've collected so far, you cannot ...
6
There's a number of reasons not to do this.
It could be considered spec work.
It's void of proper context and, as such, becomes more of a subjective heuristic review, at best.
It's void of processes such as competitive research, data analysis, etc.
It's void of history (maybe there were legit reasons why things were implemented as they were)
It's an ...
5
What are good questions to ask when interviewing intranet users for persona development? [duplicate]
Similar to:
what question should be asked to make a persona
I had the same problem and didn't know what to ask users. After some research and thought, I came up with the following:
Guidelines
Use Primarily Open-Ended Questions
Ask Naïve Questions
Ask People to show You, not tell you, when possible
Ask for specific stories,especially about anything you can’t ...
4
Yes. It is possible to be too logical in UX design; i.e., to over-analyze a problem. That's one reason why developers tend to be bad at it. Simpler is almost always better.
UX design is more than bridging the gap between designers and developers. From my point of view, UX design is about making things easy and understandable for the user; i.e., UX ...
3
Simple Heuristic Evaluation
Show some simple interfaces, give them a copy of Neilsen's 10 Usability Heuristics, and ask to identify usability issues and which heuristics are violated.
The HR rep could have a list of all the usability issues and their corresponding heuristics.
The problem with that is that it requires quite a bit of thought and time, so it ...
3
User research is quantitative/qualitative and attitudinal/behavioural . The decision of when to use which UX research method depends on your product stage as well as the factors listed by you. As you already have a significant amount of active users, my first question would be - What app analytics do you already have about the app usage? This falls in the ...
3
I've just been asked to do just that but been given the task prior to the interview. It's not the first time. It is a great way to filter out those who are UX and those who are more interaction designers. I've been given a scenario and asked to review that against the existing site and then recommend what the next actions would be.
The main problems may be ...
3
I try to ask as much about what the user does instead of what the user might want. For instance, if I'm trying to improve a user's workflow, I'll ask:
clarify what the user is trying to accomplish
what is the current workflow?
what is the hardest/most annoying/time-consuming part of the workflow?
what are the users current hacks to get around the ...
3
I read an article once that made an interesting point. I'm sorry, I was 90% sure it was on smashing, but I couldn't find it. However, the takeaway for me was to set ground rules before starting a review. The first rule was to relay a set of words that were considered "out-of-bounds". Basically a list of words that could not be used during the session. I ...
3
Speaking as somebody who occasionally sits on the interviewing side of the table I would not care at all what tool you chose to use. Balsamiq. Sketches on paper. Keynote. Whatever.
What I would care about was that you could explain the design decisions to me, and that the deliverable does the job intended.
If your not sure what kind of artefact and for ...
3
Asking closed questions is not optimal, for the reasons pointed out by Kristian - they skew the results. I think Adrian has a point too, since getting feature-specific feedback might be a better fit for a survey.
Moderation
It is the interviewer's job to moderate the discussion, to keep the focus. I think this is partly what you wanted/needed to accomplish,...
3
The question "Due to the actual cost of gas, would you like your car to run on a cheaper kind of energy rather than gas?" will not , on it's own, cause any kind of intellectual property issues. It would only cause problems if the respondent knew you were working for a particular oil, energy, or motor vehicle company (or something else vitally relevant to the ...
2
Honestly, it depends on if it's UI or UX. Interfaces are going to be more visual, and may require you to produce a more mid-fidelity prototype such as you would on Balsamiq, Moqups, or Froont.
On the flip-side, if you're interviewing for UX, notes and scribbles may be more important to help describe your actions. Of course, some of those tools would still ...
2
How to observe different roles
"An installation job usually has around 2-3 people working on different jobs (roof crew does installations, ground crew does prep work, etc). How would one conduct a CI with so many different roles?"
Option 1: Recruit help and have multiple people observing the different roles at the same installation. This might be good ...
2
First off, let's assess what you're trying to do.
The subject of this research is old (maybe obsolete) software. What you're looking for in this software is answers to "what patterns to drop", and "what patterns to keep".
Since users take good patterns for granted, as they should go unnoticed, you probably will want to focus on what the bad ones are.
Don'...
2
I'm sure this is going to upset several people but here it goes.
I personally believe that this is not a user issue. A user is not going to have insightful UX requirements and this is the reason that there is a need for your expertise.
Even the most educated people, which have used computers for 20+ years, struggle with computers and the internet as a ...
2
There's two issues here to address: getting a proper understanding of what the suggested change is supposed to accomplish, and avoiding resistance or frustration from the customer because "why are you asking me about the problem, when I've already told you what you need to do to fix it?".
In my experience it is extremely difficult to resolve this well ...
2
Detailed questions lead to detailed answers. If you don't want to face detailed, but differentiated and inconsistent clients' expectations, do not suggest any precise solution. Try to get general information on what should be the result of work with the application, what application have been used for that purpose before - if any actually have been; do some ...
2
(Just adding to Adit's plan) You have a lot of users, and that's gold . If there's also a strong community behind the app or game you are working on, or you would want to build one, products like UserVoice (https://www.uservoice.com/) or the free tool http://doorbell.io will help you collect feedback and ideas. Basically, your features could be driven by ...
2
UX pros mistrust surveys since survey answers are unreliable. People tend to mis-remember things and provide answers that are not-quite accurate. (Not that people lie on surveys. We all tell certain stories about ourselves and those stories are never absolutely accurate.) The best way to learn about users is to observe them in the context where they'll be ...
2
One person's feedback will not be determinative, because this user can be an outlier. Depending on the complexity of the application you might need at least 5 people to uncover most problems. That said starting with recalling the last experience might be a good starting point. Something like, tell us about the last time you used this application/performed ...
2
Often times it's not advised to have a design candidate solve an actual problem your company is trying to solve. This can be seen as spec work, which in the industry, is considered a no-no. Instead, create design problems that are not directly related to the core problems your company is trying to solve. They can, however, solve a similar types of problems. ...
2
When you ask leading question you are biasing the responses because you "prime" the users to answer you in a particular direction. When you ask "Is clicking on this button difficult for you to complete a task?" it is more likely that the user will say that it is infact more difficult to click this button.
The point of asking not leading questions is to see ...
2
One approach that can be useful for getting a meaningful response is to ask the user to place their response on a sliding scale between two options that have the same level of "goodness" or "badness", but different balance, then ask them if they think the change or idea is broadly good or bad.
The best way I can explain this is by showing how I'd do it in a ...
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