2010 seems like a turning point for user experience professionals. The decade has seen success stories like Amazon and Zappos that have made businesses sit up and value the power of understanding customer needs. There has been a surge in people across generations using online media for everyday activities and some of the trends in social media, mobile applications and technology have opened new doors for user experience professionals. At Evantage we have started experiencing the impact of some of these trends.
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Archive for the ‘User Research’ Category
Does Your Website Really Need a Mobile App?
Thursday, January 21st, 2010Word on the street is that if you have a great site you should create a mobile app. I’ve been hearing it a lot from clients lately that everybody is on their phone and “if users could access our information then our product will be more valuable.” Is this just a fad or is it valid? Well, that depends on your customers and your business goals. (more…)
Documenting User Research
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009As a user experience consultant, I spend a fair amount of time at the beginning of a project reading existing user research reports. These reports help me understand the user research done in the past, the outcome and what, if anything was identified for further exploration. For small and relatively simple projects these reports are fairly easy to thread together. But for large and more complex projects that involve multiple user experience professionals conducting user experience activities in parallel, tracing the user research history just six months after the project is complicated and can sometimes be challenging.
Here are the six data points that I think every user research report must include.
A look at Healthcare Systems and Web 2.0
Friday, May 22nd, 2009Recently I attended the Health 2.0 conference and was impressed by the drive and the passion displayed by everyone to transform the Healthcare industry. This included entrepreneurs, policy makers, patient advocates, physicians, corporate and research organizations. The conference discussions highlighted the changing role of patients and physicians and showcased the different ways in which Web 2.0 tools had been used to help bring this change. It was a good platform to get a sneak preview into the future of the digital landscape of Healthcare and evaluate some of our strategies for getting there.
A template for capturing & analyzing qualitative user experience data
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009Until recently, I captured all my data from interviews, contextual inquiries, walkthroughs, and user testing in Word. For each participant, I’d type my observations etc. into a copy of the test plan. At the end I was left with many many documents which I would print out, spread across my desk, and stare at.
I became dissatisfied with this form of analysis. It resists rigor. So during the second to last round of testing I did, I put all my Word notes into an Excel document to make comparisons more effectively. It was lovely. It took a lot of effort with all that copying & pasting, but it was worth it.
Lesson in User Research: Car rental experience
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008Last week, as I was driving out of the rental car garage at Minneapolis airport I realized that I did not like the car I had just rented. The windows were getting foggy, it was 36 F and I was still trying to figure out how the vent-control-knob worked. The knob that I found [image 1] was different from what I was used to [image 2]. It had icons on top, instead of around it. It could be pressed and rotated while I was used to only rotating it and it was split in between making me wonder if I needed to be press both sides of it. I tried different permutations and combinations but windows did not clear up. So I decided to roll them down a bit. This was not the interaction I had anticipated. Mentally I had Xed the check box for renting this car again. (more…)