Usability research and analysis
Five Sketches™ Consulting helps your development team with user-experience research and design to meet your business goals and your customers' needs
Questions that stakeholders, project managers, and product owners have in common:
Both questions could be answered by using the same method: a burn-down chart. But the second question requires adding certain user research findings to the chart.
Continue reading “Predict your “usable release” date by integrating user research”
Software development that uses a waterfall method is likely to deliver the wrong thing, too late. The intent of the Agile method is to deliver working software sooner, so the intended users—our clients and their customers—can provide feedback that steers us to deliver the right thing.
There’s a tension between delivering on time and delivering the right thing. In fact, the rush for on-time delivery can result in the wrong thing—an unusable product. There are ways to prevent this. User research can help. Continue reading “Ten ways to improve the usability of products that Agile teams build”
A few days ago, I tried to pump up my bicycle. I knew what to do: add air to inflate the inner-tubes. And I knew that I’d need a pump. I had to borrow one.
The connectors and attachments suggested this pump would fit two types of inner-tube valve as well as valves for air mattresses, footballs, and basketballs. So, an all-round useful pump.
But the thing is, neither the pump’s owner nor I were able to make it work. We couldn’t connect the pump to the valve. So i wondered, did the manufacturer test this product by putting it in the hands of first-time and occasional users, to see how it performed?
Recently, a client told me we needed to redesign the main data-entry form of their company’s flagship product. Customers said they didn’t like the form in our client’s SaaS or cloud-based software. Despite extra training, customers still felt apprehensive and intimidated by its complexity.
The online form was built years ago, without a designer—as was typical of dot-com start-ups. Within a few years, iPhone and iPad showed people that software could be simpler, and that’s what our client’s customers wanted, too.
We were tasked with simplifying the form. We did this by simplifying the mental model from “Surprise juggling” to “Got gossip? Fill me in”.
Our user research and analysis proved that the new mental model let users work faster with fewer errors. Continue reading “The right mental model makes software easier”
If you’ve worked in software development for a while, you may have noticed that work on usability gets postponed more often than work on new features and functions. You could see this as a form of tech debt. It accumulates with every release.
What contributes to this accumulation?
It’s not an either/or proposition. With every release you can give your product a bit more usability. And you can do this at a low-to-moderate cost and low-to-moderate risk.
Continue reading “Poor usability is a form of tech debt”When communicating with audiences around the world, the text in your software or service user interface is important. You’ll need to translate.
Translation is just one step. Delivering software in multiple languages takes more than that. Products and services need to be adjusted to regional expectations.
Even things you may assume are universal concepts—such as names or money—may need to be adapted. User research can uncover those regional differences. Here’s a quick look at:
User researchers like to see products in the hands of users, and they like to analyse quantitative and qualitative data. But they also use heuristic methods, such as expert reviews, done without a user in sight.
Expert reviews are a shortcut that rely on a usability analyst’s expertise to identify gaps in a product when compared to a set of guidelines or heuristics.
You may have come across these heuristics:
I decided to use Lyon’s five visual-design principles to assess an online app that I worked on with a team of developers and user-interface designers. Would the expert review contradict or complement the findings of our usability research on the same product? Continue reading “An expert review using heuristics versus a usability study”
If your website lets visitors sign up, join in, or add comments and reviews, then—in addition to the legitimate details you want people to contribute—you’re getting some garbage. Some of this garbage is sent by spam bots.
Spam bots post content that detracts from your website. Spam lowers your site’s perceived quality. Spam posts may include links that pull traffic to competing sites or trick your visitors into a scam. The cost of spam is hard to quantify.
Plenty of experts recommend methods to avoid spam. But in a series of user research studies, I observed that anti-spam measures impose a cost of their own. They can add friction that causes visitor abandonment and attrition. The cost of this is easier to quantify.
Some anti-spam measures impose more pain than others. I decided to assess and compare them.
Continue reading “Reduce spam without hindering usability”The tools of user research have evolved substantially over the past three decades, and need to evolve more.
Here’s a history from last century through today, based on my experience.
User researchers have had to learn to test
Divergent thinking—thinking in an unusual and unstereotyped way—*is what’s needed in software design. Divergent thinking isn’t the same thing as creativity—it’s an essential part of creativity. It is the ability to see:
User-experience designers engage in divergent thinking when they explore multiple ideas and try to “saturate the problem space.” But your entire development team can benefit from this—and save your project months of rework.