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 Joseph Addison (an English author, playwright, politician and all round lover of the written word) once said that, “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” In which case give your mind the exercise it craves by picking up some good UX books and get reading. There are tons of UX books out there so to help get you started I’ve listed some that I think are particularly good for any aspiring UXers out there. . . . Read more  Word clouds (also known as text clouds and tag clouds) are not just a cool way to show a bunch of tags they are also a great way to visually communicate all sorts of UX related information, from user stories to search keywords. In this article I outline what word clouds are, walk you through how to create them and discuss just a few of the many ways in which word clouds might be utilised. . . . Read more  Nobody enjoys filling out forms (unless they have some sort of a form filling fetish, in which case they clearly need help) but at least you can minimise the pain for your users by ensuring that your forms are as easy to use and as well designed as possible. In this article I outline some hints, tips and best practice guidelines for improving the usability (and resulting conversion rate) of your forms. . . . Read more  Online surveys are a quick and incredibly useful tool for gathering all sorts of user feedback. In next to no time you can whip something up using one of the many online survey tools out there (I particularly recommend SurveyGizmo) and start gathering feedback from real users. Often implementing the survey is the easy bit, it’s designing the thing that’s the tricky part as you won’t get the feedback you’re after if you don’t ask the right questions. In this article I outline 15 useful user feedback questions for online surveys for you to pick and choose from. . . . Read more  Think that you need to be a usability expert to carry out a usability review? Well I won’t deny that it helps (spoken like a true expert!) but since user experience certainly isn’t rocket science anyone can have a good stab at carrying out a usability review and learn a great deal in the process. In this article I walkthrough a method for examining the usability of an interactive system (website, application, mobile app etc.) by using a combination of a scenario based and heuristic (i.e. best practice guidelines) based review. I also discuss when usability reviews are most useful and outline some of the pros and cons of the technique. . . . Read more  Scenario mapping is a really quick, easy and dare I say it even fun way to collaboratively create, discuss and communicate user scenarios. Scenario mapping will help you to think about your users, to think about their tasks and most importantly to think about the sort of user experience you want to provide. It will also help to ensure that your designs are grounded in the real world because scenario mapping forces you to consider the context in which a design is likely to be used. In this article I walk you though step by step how to go about creating scenario maps and why they’re so damn useful in the first place. . . . Read more  “You’re the real thing. Yeah the real thing. You’re the real thing. Even better than the real thing”. Of course the debate continues as to whether Bono was singing about online card sorting or not during U2’s seminal ‘Even better than the real thing’, but assuming he was, was he correct? Is online card sorting really better than the real thing or a poor substitute for face-to-face card sorting? What are the pros and cons of online card sorting and when might you use it (or not use it) for a project? In this article I try to answer these important questions, along with outlining a few online card sorting tools that you might use for a project. . . . Read more  You know it’s funny. I’m yet to see any posters inviting people to ‘read here’, buttons asking people to ‘press this’ or bottles imploring people to ‘drink this’ (Alice in Wonderland aside) , and yet I still see websites requesting their users to ‘click here’ to follow some link. The use of ‘click here’ is one of those bad design habits, like frames, flashing text and animated logos that I thought had died out by now. Sadly it seems that the practice is still very much alive and well. Even our esteemed friends at Mozilla are doing it . . . Read more  Usability testing (a.k.a. user testing) is the undisputed daddy of usability techniques – it’s the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the usability world. On the face of it, it also seems incredibly simple and easy to do. You merely observe users as they use your product or prototype and then apply what you’ve learnt to improving the user experience. But like all simple ideas whilst it might be relatively easy to do, it’s difficult to do well. There’s an awful lot to think about when it comes to usability testing and so to help you get to grips with this mighty technique I’ve distilled some of what I’ve learnt in the hundreds of usability tests that I’ve run over the years into some useful usability testing hints, tips and guidelines. . . . Read more  Bipolar emotional response testing (BERT) – sounds like some sort of psychological examination technique right? Well yes it is loosely based on the repertory grid (which is a psychology interviewing technique) but it is also a damn useful means of capturing subjective design feedback from users and is especially useful for comparing different designs. Find out how to use BERT and why it should be an important addition to your user research toolkit. . . . Read more |
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