Card Sorting: How Many Users to Test

Testing ever-more users in card sorting has diminishing returns, but you should still use three times more participants than you would in traditional usability tests.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2004). Articles>Usability>Methods>Card Sorting

Card Sorting: Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned

Card sorting is a simple and effective method with which most of us are familiar. There are already some excellent resources on how to run a card sort and why you should do card sorting. This article, on the other hand, is a frank discussion of the lessons I've learned from running numerous card sorts over the years. By sharing these lessons learned along the way, I hope to enable others to dodge similar potholes when they venture down the card sorting path.

Ng, Sam. UXmatters (2007). Articles>Usability>Methods>Card Sorting

Care to Invest in Usability?

Making decisions regarding your investments is difficult, even during the best of times, and it is interesting to look at the reasons and drivers behind 'putting your money where your mouth is'. Usability, I believe, is a key part of the investment decision process. In an increasingly complex and technological world, a lot of people are perusing, gathering, and analyzing financial information using the internet. This is often the key material that helps people make their investment decisions in one particular way or another. 

Harrison, Nick. WebWord (2001). Articles>Usability>Marketing

Case Study: Conducting Large-Scale Multi-User User Tests on the United Kingdom Air Defence Command and Control System    

IBM was contracted to provide a new Air Defence Command and Control (ADCC) system for the Royal Air Force. The IBM Human Factors (HF) team was responsible for the design of the operations room, workstations and the graphical user interfaces. Because the project was safety-related, IBM had to produce a safety case. One aspect of the safety case was a demonstration of the operational effectiveness of the new system. This paper is an in-depth case study of the user testing that was carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the system. Due to time constraints the HF team had to observe five participants working simultaneously. Further, to provide a realistic operational environment, up to twenty-eight operators were required for each test. The total effort for this activity was four person-years. The paper will detail the considerations, challenges and lessons learned in the creation and execution of these multi-user user tests.

Hey, Elliott. Journal of Usability Studies (2006). Articles>Usability>Web Design

Celebrating Holidays and Special Occasions on Websites

Even small holiday decorations can increase joy of use and make websites feel more current and more connected to users' lives and physical environment. The key is to commemorate without detracting from your users' main reasons for visiting the site.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2002). Articles>Web Design>Usability

CEOs and Usability

As a usability professional, there are many reasons why you might speak with your CEO or other senior leaders. For example, you might need funding for a new laboratory or testing equipment. You might also need to justify current or future expenses, such as salaries, end user remuneration, or your travel budget. Most conversations are financial in nature.

Rhodes, John S. and Daniel Szuc. uiGarden (2006). Articles>Usability>Management

Challenges in Participant Recruiting for Usability Testing  

Effective participant recruiting is crucial to collecting reliable data during usability testing of high-tech products and services. Not only should test participants reflect the characteristics of the targeted users of the product or service, but they also must be likely to use it. Only then will their experiences and opinions yield reliable data for identifying meaningful improvements. This paper presents real-world challenges in recruiting participants for usability testing of new-technology products and services for which no firmly established customer base exists. It discusses techniques for meeting recruiting challenges, before and after test sessions begin, based on Tec-Ed usability-test case studies.

Hinderer, Deborah. Tec-Ed, Inc. (1997). Articles>Usability

Change vs. Stability in Web Usability Guidelines

A remarkable 80% of findings from the Web usability studies in the 1990s continue to hold today.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (2007). Articles>Web Design>Usability>Standards

Changing the Process of Institutional Review Board Compliance    

In the past two years I have submitted proposals for the same study to eleven IRBs at colleges and universities across the country. While I strongly support the need for obtaining IRB approval, I believe as a discipline and as individuals we need to work to revise the IRB process. As it is now practiced at many institutions, the IRB process positions composition researchers and composition research in potentially problematic ways.

McKee, Heidi. CCC (2003). Articles>Usability>Workplace

Characteristics of Web Site Content

Web site content must be recrudescent, repositorial, refluent, and rectilinear. What? Here's an innovative treatment of the essential attributes of online text. Find out why great web site content generally has these 14 characteristics that start with a "R".

Streight, Steven. Blogger.com (2005). Articles>Web Design>Content Management>Usability

Check Your Website's Usability Quickly and Cheaply

Anybody who hasn't done a usability study desperately needs to. No one knows yet how to design the perfect user interface, so even simple do-it-yourself studies often show you serious problems.

Writing that Works (2003). Articles>Web Design>Usability

Children on the Internet

The Internet today is a part of kids' natural environment. Most children have access to the Internet at school and/or at home. In 2000 there were 55,475,000 U.S. households with personal computers. 99 percent of public schools have access to the Internet. The number of Internet users worldwide is expected to grow to 300 million by 2005, from roughly 150 million currently, according to an estimate by IDC. The greatest growth will be in Asia and South America. The number of online users will rise 61 percent to 95 million in the US, more than double to 88 million in Europe and quadruple to 118 million in the rest of the world. NUA Internet Survey, on the other hand, estimated total number of people online to be 407.1 million in November 2000. In November 2000 almost 20 percent of all digital media users were children. A recent National School Boards Foundation telephone survey of 1,735 randomly-chosen households showed that children predominantly use Internet at home and in school. In a survey of 10,000 students aged 12 to 24, from 16 countries, Ipsos-Reid Group found Internet to be widely available to Swedish and Canadian students. 78 percent of students in Sweden and 74 percent in Canada are able to go online at school. 80 percent of Swedish children and 71 percent of Canadian students have web access at home. Taiwan ranked third, with 63 percent accessibility at school, followed by the UK, US, Netherlands, Australia, South Korea, Mexico, Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Brazil, and Urban China.

Demner, Dina. Universal Usability (2001). Articles>Usability>Accessibility>Children

Chinese Banks Homepage Usability Research Report

The homepages of three leading Chinese retail banks are assessed for their usability.

Zhao, Ming. uiGarden (2006). Articles>Web Design>Usability>E Commerce

Chinese Home Site Visits: Tips and Hints

You may only get one opportunity in a home visit and good planning and preparation is important. Here are some tips and hints from recent home site visits in both China and Taiwan.

Wong, Josephine. Apogee (2005). Articles>Usability>Regional>China

The Church of Usability

Jared Spool goes out of his way to position himself as anything but a user-interface designer. Yet through his company, User Interface Engineering (UIE), he is a frequent keynote speaker on effective Web design, produces a monthly publication reviewing Web sites for effectiveness, and runs a series of workshops of effective Web design. Founded in 1988, UIE is an independent research, training, and consulting firm specializing in user-interface design and product usability issues. It has grown into one of the United States' leading usability research practices, conducting more than 400 usability tests each year on software and Web sites.

Spool, Jared M. Builder.com (2001). Articles>Usability>User Interface

Cleaning Up for the Housekeeper, or, Why it Makes Sense to do Both Expert Review and Usability Testing

Contrasts the unique aspects of expert reviews and usability testing. The usability goals they address are different. Know when to use which one, and when to use both.

Straub, Kathleen. Usability Professionals Association (2006). Articles>Usability>Methods>Testing

Cleaning up for the Housekeeper: or Why it Makes Sense to do both Expert Review and Usability Testing  

Once in a while a client will tilt their head and look at me with one of those smiles. “You want to do expert review and then also usability testing?” they say. “Is this one of those consulting tricks? Why would I need to do both?” It’s a fair question. To the casual observer, usability testing and expert review probably look very similar.

Straub, Kathleen. Usability Professionals Association (2004). Articles>Usability>Methods

Clustering for Usability Participant Selection  

User satisfaction and usefulness are measured using usability studies that involve real customers. Given the nature of software development and delivery, having to conduct usability studies can become a costly expense in the overall budget. A major part of this expense is the participant costs. Under this condition, it is desirable to reduce the number of participants without sacrificing the quality of the experiment. If a company could use a smaller participant pool and get the same results as the entire pool; this would result in significant savings. Given a participant pool of size N, is there a subset of N that would yield the same results as the entire population? This research addresses this question using a data-mining clustering tool called Applications Quest.

Gilbert, Juan E., Andrea Williams, and Cheryl D. Seals. Journal of Usability Studies (2007). Articles>Usability>Testing>Methods

Cognitive Walkthrough

Cognitive walkthrough is a review technique where expert evaluators construct task scenarios from a specification or early prototype and then role play the part of a user working with that interface--'walking through' the interface. They act as if the interface was actually built and they (in the role of a typical user) was working through the tasks. Each step the user would take is scrutinized: impasses where the interface blocks the 'user' from completing the task indicate that the interface is missing something. Convoluted, circuitous paths through function sequences indicate that the interface needs a new function that simplifies the task and collapses the function sequence.

Hom, James. VWH.net. Articles>Usability>Methods

Collaboration Sessions: How to Lead Multidisciplinary Teams, Generate Buy-In, and Create Unified Design Views in Compressed Timeframes

I have participated in, led, and suffered major website redesign efforts. Whether at process-heavy consultancies, notable product companies, or design studios, all teams experience the same points of pain: late feedback, lack of common design vision, and complaints that individuals or teams didn’t have enough input.

Verhage, Sasha. Boxes and Arrows (2005). Articles>Collaboration>Usability>User Centered Design

Collecting Feedback From Users of an Archive (Reader Challenge)

The collective brainpower of the Internet is an awesome beast that used to manifest itself on Usenet newsgroups. Most of these groups have degenerated into spam, flames, and newbie ignorance. The Web has not yet evolved good ways of utilizing this power, since most so-called 'community' sites are equally degenerate.

Nielsen, Jakob. Alertbox (1999). Articles>Web Design>Usability

Collecting Information: Qualitative Research Methods for Solving Workplace Problems    

There is evidence that technical communicators are not well prepared to collect information designed to answer workplace problems with systematic methods. Because mastering the use of qualitative collection methods such as observation, artifact searches, and interviews is often incorrectly assumed to require little expertise, my goal is to show how much thought has gone into the systematic use of such methods in the social sciences, including business. Thus, I focus on the basic considerations involved in collecting information using qualitative methods, especially (though not exclusively) targeted for technical communicators within industry. To that end, I cover two broad areas: (a) fundamental issues, such as formulating researchable questions and addressing credibility and practicality in workplace research, and (b) the details of collecting qualitative information and also determining the specifics of an information collection plan. The topic of analyzing information after it is collected is not covered

Campbell, Kim Sydow. Technical Communication Online (1999). Articles>Usability>Workplace

Combining Usability Research with Documentation Development for Improved User Support  

Describes two case studies where Tec-Ed leveraged usability research and documentation activities to create solutions that met the needs of both our clients and their customers.

Keirnan, Timothy, Lori Anscheutz and Stephanie L. Rosenbaum. Tec-Ed, Inc. (2002). Articles>Documentation>Usability