6 Steps for Measuring Success on UX Projects | UX Refresh – By MARK DISCIULLO The tepid economy is putting pressure on everyone from executives to User Experience (UX) teams to show direct, measurable results. So, I’m often surprised to hear of the many projects that include a UX component to them, yet there isn’t any true, quantifiable success criteria defined for UX. Even more rare, are efforts to baseline the current design experience of an interface or product prior to a relaunch so any newly “defined” success criteria has some context. This is critical information to know so you can quantify whether or not your new designs have truly made improvements compared to past designs. Anything that is done as an organization should have justification – otherwise, why do it? UX is still being treated as though it’s a very subjective topic to measure. “This is not acceptable. Without credible UX success measurements, we all risk not being able to quantify our success. Why are we not measuring our UX efforts? So how do we do this? Start measuring now!
Gephi, an open source graph visualization and manipulation software A Five-Step Process For Conducting User Research Advertisement Imagine that this is what you know about me: I am a college-educated male between the ages of 35 and 45. I own a MacBook Pro and an iPhone 5, on which I browse the Internet via the Google Chrome browser. I tweet and blog publicly, where you can discover that I like chocolate and corgis. If your financial services client provided you with this data, could you tell them why I’ve just decided to move my checking and savings accounts from it to a new bank? We can discern plenty of valuable information about a customer from this data, based on what they do and when they do it. User research helps us to understand how other people live their lives, so that we can respond more effectively to their needs with informed and inspired design solutions. So, how does one do user research? “The spiral is based on a process of learning and need-finding,” Sanders says. The research learning spiral is a five-step process for conducting user research, originated by Erin Sanders at Frog. 1.
The product design sprint: setting the stage At the Google Ventures Design Studio, we have a five-day process for taking a product or feature from design through prototyping and testing. We call it a product design sprint. This is the second in a series of seven posts on running your own design sprint. Now that you know what design sprints are good for, you’ll need a few important ingredients to make yours successful. Pick a big fight The first thing you need is an important design problem, and if you work at a startup, chances are good you probably have one lying around the office. As long as it’s an important problem, it’s perfect for a design sprint. Get the right people The ideal sprint team is between four and eight people, but you can get by with more or fewer than that. Designer – If your startup doesn’t have a designer yet, try to bring in a ringer.CEO – At a small startup, the CEO is the key decision-maker and needs to participate in order to get an actionable solution out of the sprint. It’s also great to include:
The Mathematics of Gamification Jan 03rd At Foursquare, we maintain a database of 60 million venues. And like the world it represents, our database is ever-changing, with users from all over the world submitting updates on everything from the hours of a restaurant to the address of a new barbershop. To maintain the accuracy of our venue database, these changes are voted upon by our loyal Superusers (SUs) who vigilantly maintain a watchful eye over our data for their city or neighborhood. Like many existing crowd-sourced datasets (Quora, Stack Overflow, Amazon Reviews), we assign users points or votes based on their tenure, reputation, and the actions they take. Superusers like points and gamification. At Foursquare, we have a simple, first-principles based method of resolving proposed venue attribute updates. The Math Let’s make this more concrete with some math. Continuing, assume that after user 1 casts their vote, user 2 votes H_2 with an independent probability p_2 of being correct (i.e. agreeing with H_0).
User Research Basics User research focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies. Mike Kuniaysky further notes that it is “the process of understanding the impact of design on an audience.” The types of user research you can or should perform will depend on the type of site, system or app you are developing, your timeline, and your environment. When to Perform User Research Methods Guided by the user-centered design (UCD) process, we have provided examples of the types of research could perform at each phase of your project. Best Practices During Project Planning you should: Consult the UCD Guide for a step-by-step visual map to guide you through the user-centered design process. References Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide for User Research by Mike Kuniavsky
» Customer Development Interviews How-to: What You Should Be Learning I wrote earlier about finding people for your customer development interviews. Once you’ve found people for your interviews, you’re probably thinking, “Great, I can ask them if they’d use my product!” Wrong. OK, you’re thinking, “then what should I ask them?” A better way to think about it is, what should I be learning from this interview? It’s really important to understand the philosophy behind the customer development interview, particularly because it runs so counter to entrepreneurial instincts. Why? So, what should I be learning from the customer development interview? How is your customer currently dealing with this task/problem? The important thing about these questions is that they set up an environment where the customer is the “expert”. These questions are applicable for both consumer and enterprise products. Can you give me an example? These questions make a lot more sense when applied to a concrete example, so I’ll make one up: an online grocery shopping application. And finally…
arbor.js The Ideal Length for All Online Content 18.7K Flares Filament.io 18.7K Flares × Every so often when I’m tweeting or emailing, I’ll think: Should I really be writing so much? I tend to get carried away. And for the times that I do, it sure would be nice to know if all this extra typing is hurting or helping my cause. I want to stand out on social media, but I want to do it in the right way. Curious, I dug around and found some answers for the ideal lengths of tweets and titles and everything in between. The ideal length of a tweet is 100 characters Whom should you trust when it comes to advice on the ideal length of a tweet? Twitter’s best practices reference research by Buddy Media about tweet length: 100 characters is the engagement sweet spot for a tweet. Creativity loves constraints and simplicity is at our core. The Buddy Media research falls in line with similar research by Track Social in a study of 100 well-known brands that are popular on Twitter. The ideal length of a Facebook post is less than 40 characters Recap