Five UX Research Pitfalls

In the last few years, more and more organizations have come to view UX design as a key contributor to successful products, connecting teams with end-users and guiding product innovation within the organization. Though it’s fantastic to see this transition happen, there are growing pains associated with becoming a user-driven organization. These are the pitfalls that I see organizations grappling with most often.

Pitfall 1: It’s easier to evaluate a completed, pixel-perfect product so new products don’t get vetted or tested until they’re nearly out the door.

Months into a development cycle and just days before the release date, you realize that the UI has serious flaws or missing logic. If you’re lucky, there is enough flexibility in the schedule to allow grumbling engineers to re-architect the product. More likely, though, the PM will push to meet the original deadline with the intent to fix the UI issues later. However, “later” rarely happens. Regardless, everyone wonders: how could these issues have been caught earlier?

September 02, 2010
Elaine Wherry
UX, Emotion, and Free Coke Machines

At 4Point we have a refrigerator. It's pretty fancy, with double doors, an icemaker, and a water filtration system. It beeps at you if you leave it open too long. Inside, you'll find all kinds of beverages: fruit juices, milk, mineral water (sparkling or flat), V8, various types of soda, and of course beer (for Fridays after 4:30PM only, sadly). If you're thirsty, chances are that you'll find something in there that you like, for free.

In the eBay Town Hall (where I recently attended 360|Flex), right by the washrooms there is a Coke machine. It's identical in every way to any vending machine you'd run into in the wild. It's big. It's red. It just sits there, humming expectantly. There's only one unusual thing about it: it is free. Free as in, "Don't insert coins and select your beverage."

April 05, 2010
Taylor Bastien
Organized Approach to Emotional Response Testing

Most user experience designers will have heard of the Product Reaction Cards (doc), a set of 118 words and phrases developed for Microsoft by Joey Benedek and Trish Miner in 2002 that can be deployed in a user testing workshop to help people articulate their emotional responses to a product.

The Product Reaction Cards are part of the Desirability Toolkit (doc) that suggests facilitators ask users to choose the cards that "best describe the product or how using the product made them feel" and then ask them to narrow their selection to just five cards. The cards selection process is then followed by an interview where the participant explains why they selected those five cards.

March 04, 2010
Nathanael Boehm
Toward a better tablet OS, part 2

Part one of this article can be found here.

A man could write for days and not say all there is to say about optimizing a UI for multitouch and tablet use. So I'll limit my observations for now to a few specific cases having to do with the mouse, which has influenced UIs so deeply, and for so long, that it's hard for people to imagine how to do anything substantial without one. This is, in fact, one of the reasons it is taking so long for a tablet to emerge. And although a tablet OS must be more than a touch-enabled desktop OS, it makes more sense to start with more and pare it down, if one cannot start from scratch.

February 05, 2010
Devin Coldewey
Beyond the Usability Lab: Conducting Large-scale Online User Experience Studies

Usability testing and user experience research typically take place in a controlled lab with small groups. While this type of testing is essential to user experience design, more companies are also looking to test large sample sizes to be able compare data according to specific user populations and see how their experiences differ across user groups. But few usability professionals have experience in setting up these studies, analyzing the data, and presenting it in effective ways.  Online usability testing offers the solution by allowing testers to elicit feedback simultaneously from 1,000s of users. Beyond the Usability Lab offers tried and tested methodologies for conducting online usability studies. It gives practitioners the guidance they need to collect a wealth of data through cost-effective, efficient, and reliable practices. The reader will develop a solid understanding of the capabilities of online usability testing, when it's appropriate to use and not use, and will learn about the various types of online usability testing techniques.

*The first guide for conducting large-scale user experience research using the internet

January 26, 2010
Designing Superior Shopping Experiences

Imagine shopping in a store where the displays never change. Customers select items by browsing through monolithic aisles of products. Store displays are minimal and uninteresting. Items in the displays are hard to find or even unavailable. This doesn't seem like a great shopping experience, does it? Yet this is what online shoppers experience (and accept as standard) on many large e-commerce sites.

November 29, 2009
George Plesko
Less is Better

David Heinemeier Hansson is one of the most influential voices on the Internet. He is the author of the immensely popular Ruby on Rails programming framework, is a noted blogger and media figure, and is elegantly opinionated when it comes to the best ways to make great software. People follow David's lead in droves, and for good reason: as a partner in the multi-million dollar company 37signals, David is one of the most successful young entrepreneurs in today's Web economy.

November 29, 2009
Brad Umbaugh, David Heinemeier Hansson
Failing Fast: Getting Projects Out of the Lab

“Failing fast” means getting putting applications out in the wild as soon as possible to learn whether they will succeed. This gives you access to early user feedback to quickly weed out ideas and methods that don’t work. Failing fast is a good thing—or, at least, it's preferable to failing slowly and spending too much time, effort and money developing a product that should have been put to rest earlier. Money and time you save by cutting off unsuccessful projects quickly will mean you have more money and time for the successful ones. The concept of failing fast can help businesspeople and stakeholders reduce the riskiness of launching products by letting real users and the marketplace dictate their product choices.

November 22, 2009
Tony Hillerson, Alan Lewis, Scott Green, Ryan Stewart, Randy Rieland
User Experience Re-Mastered: Your Guide to Getting the Right Design

Good user interface design isn't just about aesthetics or using the latest technology. Designers also need to ensure their product is offering an optimal user experience. This requires user needs analysis, usability testing, persona creation, prototyping, design sketching, and evaluation through-out the design and development process. User Experience Re-Mastered takes tried and tested material from best-selling books in Morgan Kaufmann's Series in Interactive Technologies and presents it in typical project framework. Chauncey Wilson guides the reader through each chapter, introducing each stage, explaining its context, and emphasizing its significance in the user experience lifecycle. This gives readers practical and easily applicable direction for creating web sites and web applications that ensure the ultimate experience. A must read for students, those new to the field, and anyone designing interfaces for people!

    A guided, hands-on tour through the process of creating the ultimate user experience - from testing, to prototyping, to design, to evaluation

October 18, 2009