Dive into UX design topic based on our years of award-winning UX consulting from Experience Dynamics, Founder and Chief Experience Officer, Frank Spillers.
Summary: Hiring UX Designers and UX managers or UX consultants can be difficult especially for product, marketing, engineering or HR folks who are unfamiliar with what a UX designer ought to be doing to generate real value. Know what you are shopping for, so you get what your organization needs! Better yet avoid these mistakes made by those before you. Good UX hiring contributes to reinforcing an Outside-In Design organization.
Summary: Testing with 5 users has become a commandment in UX research. Worse yet, a sample of 5 has become the rule, for any type of user research (field studies or diary studies). Sample size is a big deal in UX because it impacts your learning and decision-making. Skimp on sample size and you will likely cut yourself short of valuable insights.
For Usability Testing: If you follow Jakob Nielsen's advice: test with 5 users or less (2 users for low-fidelity prototypes) and do many iterations of testing (at least 3 rounds of testing). Our advice: if you have multiple user segments and you don't have time to play with 3-5 iterations, test with 8-10 users for prototypes, and 15-20 users for finished products. If you can, or need to iterate then a second round of testing should suffice.
Summary: This infographic summarizes 7 classic mistakes in approaching user experience design and process. The text of the infographic is below the image, with the addition of more summary notes not found in the infographic--look for “Comment” in the text version below for these exclusives.
User Experience Management combines organizational dynamics: the right people, in the right role/org chart, doing the right processes and delivering business value through design.
Comment: If you just think UX is about ease of use, you’re missing the party over in the Desirability department.
Summary: Diary Studies are one of the most under-utilized and least understood UX techniques. Diary Studies are slightly more complicated than user testing and require additional know-how in study design, moderation and deployment. In this webinar and complimentary e-book, you'll learn how to use diary studies like a pro, avoiding the pitfalls inherent in diary studies.
Summary: Surveys are often over-used or mis-placed as a research technique that many teams rely on to figure out usability and user experience problems. Understand the limits and opportunities of the tool and instead either don't lean on it too heavily or use it as an adjunct to reach a wider audience--as part of a qualitative user research project (user interviews).
Surveys are great, except when they are not. Surveys are often used as a way to gather usability feedback. This makes sense, after all questions like: Do users use your site or app? Do they find it valuable? What do they want? are perfectly reasonable questions to ask your users. So what is the problem with surveys for user experience questions?
First, be clear that surveys are a market research tool. That means they are not entirely appropriate as a usability or user research tool. Why?