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.
Search for articles by tag
- 5 articles tagged accessibility
- 4 articles tagged benefits
- 8 articles tagged case study
- 1 article tagged css
- 2 articles tagged discount usability
- 2 articles tagged ecommerce
- 5 articles tagged expert review
- 1 article tagged fitts law
- 1 article tagged focus groups
- 1 article tagged forms
- 3 articles tagged guidelines
- 5 articles tagged heuristic evaluation
- 10 articles tagged iso 9241
- 2 articles tagged iterative design
- 3 articles tagged layout
- 1 article tagged legal
- 10 articles tagged management
- 5 articles tagged metrics
- 4 articles tagged moderating
- 3 articles tagged morae
- 2 articles tagged navigation
- 1 article tagged personas
- 4 articles tagged prototyping
- 5 articles tagged questionnaires
- 1 article tagged quotations
- 4 articles tagged roi
- 7 articles tagged selling usability
- 10 articles tagged standards
- 1 article tagged style guide
- 2 articles tagged survey design
- 2 articles tagged task scenarios
- 2 articles tagged templates
- 11 articles tagged tools
- 21 articles tagged usability testing
- 1 article tagged user manual
Top 20 popular articles
- The A-Z of Usability
- Heuristic Evaluation with Morae
- Usability Test Moderation: The Comic
- Creating a usability dashboard
- New standards in usability
- Layout grids for Axure
- Tips for writing user manuals
- Omnigraffle and Visio stencils
- Bluffers' guide to ISO 9241
- Writing the perfect participant screener
- 10 ways to maximise your usability budget
- How to run an unmoderated usability test
- Site visit interviews: from good to great
- Measuring the usability of everyday products
- Beyond the usability questionnaire
- Red route usability
- Is Consumer Research Losing Its Focus?
- A Business Case for Usability
- Selling usability to your manager
- 5 Ways to embed usability in your company
- See all articles & resources