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’
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?
Hi, my name is Luz Caballero. I'm a User Experience designer/researcher.