Using the cognitive interview to improve your survey questions
In an ideal survey, each respondent interprets the question in the way we intended. But in reality, survey questions are misunderstood. Participants may find the answers hard to recall, difficult to estimate, and struggle to map their answer to the choices we provide. The cognitive interview provides a useful method to evaluate survey questions and remove these problems.
Warning: Your web survey is a lot less reliable than you think
Because surveys usually involve hundreds of respondents, many design teams value the findings from a survey more highly than the results from small sample usability tests, user interviews and field visits. But the results of most web surveys are biassed by coverage error and non-response error. This means surveys, like most qualitative data in user research, should be triangulated with other sources of data.
20 things you can do this year to improve your user’s experience
The new year is as good a time as any to review and improve the way you work. With a good user experience now widely seen as the key attribute of many high-tech products, it makes sense to review your own products to see how you can give them that user experience edge. Here are 20 quick, simple and virtually free ideas you can apply in 2012.
Web survey design step-by-step
Many people think that the key to great web surveys is to craft good questions. Creating good questions is important but this is really just a small part of the battle. To design great web surveys you need to follow 6 steps. Following these steps will help you get valid and accurate data to drive commercial business decisions.
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".
Data collection for usability research
How should you go about collecting data in usability tests? This article examines the data collection process in usability studies and describes some popular data logging solutions. Since most of these tools are expensive, we show you how you can use Microsoft Excel with Visual Basic macros to collect the data.
Measuring satisfaction: Beyond the usability questionnaire
Most usability tests culminate with a short questionnaire that asks the participant to rate, usually on a 5- or 7-point scale, various characteristics of the system. Experience shows that participants are reluctant to be critical of a system, no matter how difficult they found the tasks. This article describes a guided interview technique that overcomes this problem based on a word list of over 100 adjectives. We also include a spreadsheet to generate and randomise the word list.
20 tips for writing web surveys
Many people think questionnaire and survey design is common sense. If that's true then common sense can't be that common because many surveys on the web are very poorly designed. For example, surveys often ask irrelevant questions or biased questions or just too many questions. These problems make the resulting data impossible to analyse. This article reviews best practice in survey design.
The A-Z of Usability
Rather than create yet another definition of usability, we decided to take a different approach and work through the alphabet, picking one word for each letter to capture the flavour of the field. So we proudly present the A-Z of usability or usability in 26 words.
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- Dec 2: Usability task scenarios: The beating heart of a usability test
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- Aug 5: The future of UX research is automated, and that's a problem