I want to write today about measuring subjective qualities. I’m going to talk about “comfort”, but it applies to lots of other things: “easeness of use”, “satisfaction”, “goodness”, whatever you can think of that can’t be measured on a scale (i.e. scales: °C, meters, number of errors).
I’m working on a project that involves some ergonomics, more specifically it requires or would benefit from the label “comfortable”. Like we always do, we designed a test, collected participants, drafted consent forms, prepared the facilities… and then… the unexpected. To my embarrassment, we had to repeat our whole biomechanics experiment because we had gathered our results in a manner that didn’t afford any meaningful analysis. This is the brave account of what went wrong and how we solved it, which I send into the world hoping that at least one less designer will stumble against this cheeky stone ;)
Continue reading ‘Comfort-o-meter: how to measure the subjective’
Hi, my name is Luz Caballero. I'm a User Experience designer/researcher.