Userfocus Usability Newsletter, March 2015

Welcome to the March edition of the Userfocus usability and user experience newsletter!

Message from the Editor
Evangelising user research
From our archives: Writing the perfect participant screener
What we're reading
Upcoming training courses
User experience quotation of the month

Message from the Editor

User researchers sometimes tell me that they feel their work is ignored by the design team. This is a complex problem and I don't think that there is a simple, general solution. But one undoubted cause lies with user researchers themselves: they sometimes fail to present their research in ways that is useful and usable. So this month, I've written about just this problem.

We're also including a new section in this newsletter: From the Archives. We've been publishing our newsletter for eight years and that means some of our older articles get buried under new content. By turning the spotlight on an article you may not have read, but that's still relevant, I hope you get more value from our monthly communication.

Until next time.

— David Travis

Evangelising user research

User experience professionals often complain that design teams fail to take action on the findings from user research. But researchers need to shoulder some of the blame: research reports are often too wordy, arrive too late and fail to engage teams with the data. Dressed-down personas, customer journey maps, photo-ethnographies, affinity diagramming, screenshot forensics and hallway evangelism provide 6 alternatives. Read the article in full: Evangelising user research.

From our archives: Writing the perfect participant screener

"Know thy user" is the first principle of usability, so it's important that you involve the right kind of people in your usability study. These 8 tips for screening participants will show you how to recruit articulate, representative users for your research, quickly filter out the people you don't want and help you avoid the dreaded "no show". Read the review in full: Writing the perfect participant screener.

What we’re reading

Some interesting usability-related articles that got our attention over the last month:

Accessibility case study from BBC shows why you need to run usability tests with disabled people not just use WCAG 2
Good example of a "breakup letter" to understand a user's wants and needs.
Comprehensive list of journals in HCI. Bookmarked.
Designing for older people.
Has the 3-click myth been re-invented in Marissa Mayer's 2-tap rule?
How, and Why, Apple Overtook Microsoft. TL;DR: Apple had a vision.
UserTesting raises $45.5 million in financing; describes "huge market opportunity for user testing services".

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Online training in user experience

We have three online training courses in user experience. Save money when you purchase them as a bundle.

User Experience quotation of the month

“It is fidelity of the experience, not the fidelity of the prototype, sketch, or technology that is important from the perspective of ideation and early design.” — Bill Buxton