21
Place demographic questions at the end of the survey. If you place them at the beginning, you will induce a phenomenon called stereotype threat.
Stereotype threat says that if you remind someone of a stereotyped attribute of themselves, it will impact their performance even if they don't believe that stereotype. For example, suppose a girl has heard a ...
18
I have read up on this a bit, and it seems that my answer will contradict some of the things that have already been mentioned. My sources are all academic, and as such reflect the use of on-line surveys for conducting experiments. Feel free to read the sources that I link to, and draw your own conclusions. I mention some peripheral work as it relates to on-...
17
After some years of fighting I got used to it. There are various ways to struggle with it, you can play as an authority often saying "no", or actually "NO!", but you will lose your followers, because there are always decisive people who will maintain that they know better. You can try to establish processes, but there are going to be people who will not ...
17
I assume you're referencing this diagram of Garrett's.
If you read Garrett's book about that diagram, you'll find that he has already aligned that diagram with another showing the stage at which strategy occurs:
...so strategy is the first step, occurring when you're determining user needs and laying out objectives.
16
If you looking for different processes rather than methods, there are
User Centered Design / Goal Directed Design
Usability Engineering
Design Thinking
LeanUX / LeanStartup
Data (or Metrics) Driven Design
Open Innovation / Participatory Design
Lead User Design / Design-driven Innovation
Four of them did I examine for innovation capabilites in a past thread ...
16
I've only known a few folk who've worked at Apple. These are a few things that seem relevant from what they have said:
They say "no" a lot. New projects, and current projects, get killed. Even if they're fairly far along in development. They don't seem to fall into the sunk cost fallacy.
Design input starts early, and carries on throughout the entire ...
14
This article cites some studies about it:
Some recent research in the Journal of Business and Psychology
reveals that placing demographic items at the beginning of a survey
increases the response rate to those items in comparison to
demographic items placed at the end. And more importantly, it did not
affect scores on the three noncognitive ...
14
Although I am a staunch supporter of agile and lean methodologies in UX, it's important to remember that they are just methodologies. UX is not about how you create a great user experience, rather it is about what the user experience is.
So there are many different UX methodologies that can achieve good results. Often one methodology is more suited to a ...
14
In terms of navigation and hierarchy, Open Card Sorting should do the job.
Open Card Sorting: Participants are given cards showing site content with no pre-established groupings. They are asked to sort cards into groups that they feel are appropriate and then describe each group. Open card sorting is useful as input to information structures in new or ...
13
Standard Progressive Disclosure should start at the simplest, least intrusive information first. Maybe even consider allowing users to put off answering some parts of the form (this will probably reduce completion rate of the "extra" fields but increase the completion rate of the start of the survey). But if you must do it all in one go, I'd generally ...
11
I agree with Steve Psomas in The Five Competencies of User Experience Design. Visual design is one of the competencies. Still, you shouldn't be perfect in all of those.
10
It's a good but difficult question, without any universally good solution. However I will try to give you some things that you can do to help with this.
Firstly, recognise that the role of a UX designer is to say no a lot of the time. That doesn't mean that you say "no" whenever someone suggests something that you don't particularly like.
Secondly, you ...
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 ...
8
Much of the mystery behind Apple’s design process is due to Apple being deliberately secretive, and sometimes even engaging in active deception. I believe this notion that they don’t do user research is part of their disinformation campaign.
Perhaps the clearest publicly-available view of how Apple works is from a study by UIE on what makes a successful ...
8
User Experience strategy is about taking the information about the user and information about the business and turning that into an approach for the User Experience. It overlaps with the role of a good Business Analysis and will often involve:
Business Strategy
Existing best practice / competitor reviews.
Existing behavior analysis from stats and from one ...
7
You might be referring to Google Venture's "Design Sprint" process: http://www.gv.com/lib/the-product-design-sprint-a-five-day-recipe-for-startups.
They've basically created a highly condensed, 5-day "sprint" where they help clients:
Understand a design problem
Develop as many potential solutions as possible
Pick the best solutions and start creating user ...
7
As you already mentioned, even if you might find Wiki entries, the borders of what is included and what not are kind of blurry. I re-ordered the items because of context - this is the consensus that I use for my day-to-day worklife:
Use Cases: A feature- or part-of-the-site- usage scenario. If you take use cases for a shopping cart, these would be: 1) Save ...
6
You can use gamification elements to engage users into filling their profiles. One of the examples is engaging users to complete LinkedIn profile:
Some gamification tricks for user motivation are:
Make form filling meaningful for donors. You could explain why it is so important to fill the form.
Provide some kind of PBL (Points-Badges-Leaderboard) as ...
5
This all depends on what your definition of UX is... which has been a changing beast over the years - from what the experiences is through to a job description for certain kinds of role.
I would personally say that you do need the qualifiers - since you can apply UX practices in many different contexts. For example:
A dedicated UX agency brought in to do a ...
5
Strategy is the path between vision and execution.
UX Strategy is about defining what kind of experience you want. For example Apple claims that they start with "How they want people to feel" when they start the design.
Strategy then gets into a plan to get to there.. for example doing away with skeumorphic design in favor of a flat design, focussing more ...
5
In the situation you describe, you have to test the whole.
If you have just designed something, you want to know if it works at all. For this, always test the whole. The point of a complex system is that it is more than the sum of its parts. Reactions to parts will not predict reactions to the whole. In many situations, some parts won't even make sense ...
5
The problem with DT definitions is that if you ask two practitioners to define DT you'll get four different answers — see this discussion on the DT LinkedIn group for example ;-)
That said, since the IDEO and d.school approaches to DT have lot of the same folk involved, I'd say that these two are mostly describing the same process with different words.
...
4
There is evidence that asking for personal data at the end of a long sign up form or at the end of a test improves conversion rates, but this is somewhat obvious as the person has by that point invested time into it. This situation is also affected by the person wanting something that they will achieve by giving the information.
A survey is rather ...
4
I would suggest you would ask the user to give their personal information before the survey. Another way to do it is to let them know that there is a form at the end of the survey that they can choose to fill out and win something. Let them know that the form is not mandatory.
An honest interface is very important if you want your customers to enjoy their ...
4
If you want empirical method then you need test users, measurable criteria for "better names" and methodology of measuring. Here are some ideas:
Approach 1: If you have a lot of test user you can do use classic prototype-decide approach:
Prepare 2 versions of UI (could be prototypes): One with current technical names, other with simpler alternative names. ...
4
I don’t think it will work well to provide the user with a description of each upcoming feature and ask them to rate or sort them. That requires users to try to imagine what the upcoming feature would be like in their life once it’s implemented. That’s much harder than a usability test, where users can try out exactly how a feature is implemented and give ...
4
We use the standard "Primary" "Secondary" "link elsewhere/escape" for our actions and never use red and green. Reason red and green is never used is because they may place un-intentional emphasis on the wrong things.
e.g. We have a button for deleting an item. This is not a common action, yet if we make it red, this is the one thing we're drawn to on the ...
4
Joel is not always right...
The article conflates two different arguments in support of bloat. It makes the case that:
Resource bloat can improve software because (a) it allows developers to ship faster; (b) it allows software to support more features, and (c) bloat is relative, meaning that if computing power grows faster than resource bloat, then in &...
4
Try to find users that are likely to use your product/service and interview them to see their attitudes towards your idea.
You can also survey your target users to gain additional information on their opinions.
You can also try something like an A/B test. Try 2 or 3 variants of your subscription plan/idea, distribute them evenly among subscribers and see ...
4
Do you have the opportunity to create a low-fidelity prototype of the product?
The Wizard of Oz experiment comes to mind as it works very well on unfinished products (specifically low-fidelity prototypes): it mimics a finished product by involving a human actor (usually out of sight) to perform actions on behalf of the system. However, this method requires ...
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