The 1-page usability test plan
The Usability Test Plan is a critical document to help you manage and organise a usability test. But it can sometimes appear too documentation-heavy in agile environments. What would a usability test plan look like if it was re-envisioned as a single page?
Cheap and free under-the-radar alternatives to field visits
People in small companies or people who work as a UX team of one often find it hard to gain commitment to do field research because it's perceived as too expensive or too time consuming. What quick and low-cost alternatives are available?
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.
7 myths about paper prototyping
Paper prototyping is probably the best tool we have to design great user experiences. It allows you to involve users early in the design process, shows you how people will use your system before you've written any code, and supports iterative design. So why are some design teams still resistant to using it? Here are 7 objections I've heard to paper prototyping and why each one is mistaken.
Usability testing with hard-to-find participants
For most products, it's easy to track down participants for a usability test. But there are some products where end-users are difficult to find and recruit. For these products, it's better to use surrogate users as a proxy for genuine users than not to usability test at all, but you must manage the risks appropriately.
247 web usability guidelines
Although designing usable systems requires far more than simply applying guidelines, guidelines can still make a significant contribution to usability by promoting consistency and good practice. We use this list of guidelines in our consultancy work. For best results, remember to interpret the guideline in context — this requires a bit more thought but ensures you will get a lot more from your review. You can also download the guidelines as an Excel workbook.
Credit-Crunch Usability: 10 ways to maximise your usability budget
Being frugal during economic hard times is good business practice. So how can you squeeze your usability budget and still deliver great insights? These 10 suggestions for streamlining your usability efforts explode the myth that usability is expensive and time-consuming.
Discount usability: time to push back the pendulum?
Discount usability techniques are a great way to eradicate usability problems. But they can never answer the question, "How usable is this system?" We blow the dust off some techniques commonly used in the early days of usability testing to see if they can provide an answer.
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- Dec 2: Usability task scenarios: The beating heart of a usability test
- Nov 4: Common traps in user needs research and how to avoid them
- Oct 7: Transitioning from academic research to UX research
- Sep 2: The minimalist field researcher: What's in my bag?
- Aug 5: The future of UX research is automated, and that's a problem