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Check out our articles and tools relating to usability and user research.
Usability for Medical Devices: A New International Standard
A recently published international standard requires manufacturers of medical devices to follow a user centered design process. To comply, manufacturers of medical devices will need to change the way they design, develop, test and manufacture their systems.
A Business Case for Usability
Until usability gets embedded in the processes of your company, you'll probably find you need to justify the investment. Fortunately, usability initiatives deliver a major return on investment: it's not unusual for usability projects to return benefits of 5-10 times their cost in the first year alone.
Credit-Crunch Usability: 10 ways to maximize 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? As well as saving you money, these 10 tips will also help you explode the myth that usability must, of necessity, be expensive and time-consuming.
Measuring Usability with the Common Industry Format (CIF)
Are you a CIO, purchasing officer, or IT manager, about to invest in productivity software for your company? If you are, here's a question you should ask your supplier before you sign on the dotted line: "Just how usable is this product?" Astonishingly, most companies won't be able to answer, and those that try will answer the question only vaguely. But now help is at hand. It's called CIF. And it's about to change the game.
Red Route Usability
Important roads in London are known as 'red routes' and Transport for London do everything in their power to make sure passenger journeys on these routes are completed as smoothly and quickly as possible. Define the red routes for your web site and you'll be able to identify and eliminate any usability obstacles on the key user journeys.
Quantitative vs. Qualitative Data: getting it straight
People often throw around the terms 'objective' and 'subjective' when talking about the results of a research study. These terms are frequently equated with the statistical terms 'quantitative' and 'qualitative'. The analogy is false, and this misunderstanding can have consequences for the interpretations and conclusions of usability tests.
Levels of Measurement
It is easy think of all numeric user research data as being equivalent. For the most part numbers seem to be, well … numbers. In reality, however, we process bits of information in different ways using different sorting and measuring rules. Although we often do not stop to think about it in this way, recording and classifying of data is always done according to a scheme.
Is Customer Research losing its Focus?
Focus groups have come under critical scrutiny in recent times and their reliability as a means of understanding customers is frequently questioned. One problem is that, in spite of what conventional wisdom tells us, it is not the voice of the consumer that matters. What matters is the mind of the consumer. The mistake is in believing that what the mind thinks, the voice speaks. It is time to start exploring methods that can probe beyond the obvious and deliver stronger predictive value. In this article we take a closer look at focus groups and suggest when they should and should not be used.
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Interact is a quick-read quarterly "window on usability". It gives you an excuse to take a break, put your feet on the desk, and check out happenings in the world of design, innovation, usability, and behavioral research.
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20 Tips for Writing 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 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.
How to Write a User Manual
User manuals have a bad reputation. In a recent USA Today poll that asked readers "Which technological things have the ability to confuse you?" user manuals came out top! Increasingly companies are rethinking the way they approach user manuals. Here are some tips for improving the usability of user manuals.
Checkpoints for Reviewing Usability Test Reports
As project managers, designers, engineers and researchers you no doubt often find yourself reading, reviewing and advising on research reports that have been commissioned or written by others. The ability to critically review such reports, and to help stakeholders weigh up the merits or shortcomings of research data and conclusions, is an extremely valuable skill. Our list of checkpoints will help you ensure you cover the key issues.
Download the Checklist (PDF: 76k)
Is your design process customer-centered?
What does it mean to have a customer-centered design process? How will your design process impact the success of your products? Discover what customer-centered design really means and find out how your approach measures up by taking this quick and thought-provoking test.
Take the test (Downloads as an Excel file: 45k)