UX nerd

One of the toughest recurrent moments in my job is the “qualitative research moment”. The moment when I have to convince someone to do some in-depth user study with a few participants to produce a list of qualitative results and derive design recommendations. Whether I suggest observing users or interviewing them, the moment I stray outside A/B testing there it comes… the disbelieving look™, like I needed three degrees to become a fortune teller :S

I want to write a full post about prototype fidelity and testing methods later, and some (approximate) guidelines about when to do which thing… so I’ll try to keep digression to a minimum ;) Now, without further ado… my humble best attempt at explaining why qualitative research can be objective, reliable and produce useful insights about how users experience systems and products (and take that look off your face already, I can see it in my crystal ball and I’m not liking it ;) Continue reading ‘Qualitative research’

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’

Some months ago, I asked you to complete a questionnaire about your tabbed browsing habits. Thanks! I got 99 responses. What follows is a brief summary of how I analyzed the data, the results I got and some analysis. Later we used the results to design an alternative to tabs for the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge summer 09 (with Maria and some help from Nico), but I’ll write about that later.

Continue reading ‘Tabbed browsing usage results’

I’m now in the middle of a project to find out how the use of emoticons in IM conversations relates to the use of actual facial expressions and, together with my colleagues, I have to set up an experiment. We have this plan about how we’re going to do it:  we have interesting literature about the subject, we have a nice and original experiment design, we’ve found the technology we need to carry it out and we’ve almost figured out who we want as participants. But at the end of out to-do list for today “# of participants” is still there, sporting a devilish wink >;-) So, how is sample size chosen when doing an experiment?

Continue reading ‘The choice of sample size in an experiment’