Usability Insights: Crazy Egg When I first heard about a tool called “Crazy Egg,” I thought maybe I’d logged into the wrong webinar. But when the presenter started talking about how she’d used Crazy Egg to make decisions about placing strategic content on their site, I perked up. By the end, I’d signed up for my own Crazy Egg account, and I’ve used it on many projects since. Read on to receive more usability insights and to find out why Crazy Egg should be in ... Read More >
Feb 13
Client News: OR System Meets FDA UX Requirements!
AlertWatch, Inc. In the News Occasionally, the usability of a client’s application is directly involved in life-or-death situations, as is the case with University of Michigan startup company AlertWatch, Inc. The AlertWatch:OR system helps attending physicians, Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNAs), and residents in anesthesiology to monitor patients in the operating room (OR) by aggregating data from primary physiological monitors, health ... Read More >
Dec 11
The Secret to Participant Recruiting Success!
Participant Recruiting: Secret to UX Research Success The success of user research is largely driven by the quality of the participants. Of course, the study must be well-designed, with carefully defined research objectives, realistic usage scenarios, and appropriate tasks. The profile of the product’s or application’s target audience must also be clearly articulated, with specific user characteristics identified and online and phone screening tools created ... Read More >
Oct 16
Analytic Versus Creative Design Thinking
This month’s “3 Questions With” post is a conversation with Garett Dworman, TecEd senior UX consultant with expertise in user research, information architecture, and user-centered design. Garett has a strong interest in how people disseminate, access, and consume information. 1. How do you characterize UX design? Design is a problem-solving process that must combine analysis of a problem with creativity for inventing a solution (see Pabini Gabriel-Petit’s ... Read More >
Oct 10
5 Things Product Developers Tell Us About User Research
In today’s environment product development teams are charged with building products—websites, web-based applications, mobile apps, software and devices —that deliver the best customer experience to the market. These customer experiences increasingly occur on multiple devices, in a wide variety of environments, and with new models of interaction. Given this common scenario, how can a product team know if the customer experience is consistent across all ... Read More >
Sep 24
Jumping on a User Experience Carousel Ride
Effective Home Page Carousels The ubiquitous carousel appears on most of today’s business websites. A carousel is the large banner of scrolling images usually taking up a home page’s most valuable “real estate” – at the top, or “above the fold,” of the website. As an example, see our own home page carousel. The large images auto forward or users can choose to scroll through the images to view at their choosing. Carousels usually offer some indication (or ... Read More >
Sep 18
The Wisdom of Integrating Branding and User Research
What is a Brand? A generally accepted definition of the term “brand” is “the emotional relationship a product, company, organization or even person has with their customers, audiences, consumers, and larger community.” This is a definition modified from several sources including Marketingspot. In terms of the brand of a product, application or website, a brand elicits thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and responses from customers, or users. Responses ... Read More >
Sep 12
The UX Myth of “Do it Yourself” Usability Testing
UX Myth Explained Earlier this year, .Net magazine posted an article that takes a close look at several myths often associated with usability testing. The article offers insight into five commonly held misconceptions about usability testing. As the article notes, usability testing of a product, application or website is by far the most widely used usability evaluation method. You can see from the spirited discussion in the comments section that several ... Read More >
Aug 22
A Can’t-Miss UX Resource Spotlights the Customer
Through our various user research projects related to product, application and website development, our passion is to integrate human factors and the voice of the customer in the design to help satisfy customers and keep them coming back. Because of this commitment, when we hear about resources that affirm the priority of customer experience, we stand up and take notice. That’s why we’re sharing news of an insightful book entitled “Customers Included: How to ... Read More >
Aug 13
Organizing Your Website or Application: It’s All in the Cards
Card Sorting Explained Most developers would love to get inside the heads of their typical users to see how their application or website can best be organized. How can the structure of information on a website or application make the most sense to the typical user? That’s a compelling information architecture-related question that is best answered by the research technique of card sorting. Card Sorting Defined In card sorting, researchers ask ... Read More >
