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User Experience

Design for Fingers, Touch, and People, Part 1

By Jim Ross

Although UX designers usually consider various different design directions early during projects, ed adiposity they typically choose one design to develop further—long before conducting the first usability test. However, dosage testing multiple designs early in a project can provide much more useful information than testing just a single design solution. When participants can experience two or more designs during testing, order they can provide better feedback. As a result, you can gain greater insight into the elements of each design that work well and those that cause problems.

What Is Qualitative, Comparative Usability Testing?

When you read the term comparative usability testing, you might think it refers only to benchmarking the usability of an existing user interface against that of its competitors. In this type of comparative usability testing, you’d compare existing user interfaces with each other, using quantitative metrics such as task-completion and error rates and time on task. Therefore, participants perform test tasks without interruption and do not think aloud. You might also compare participants’ responses to a questionnaire. Read More

By Corinne Wayshak

Executives want to know the return on investment (ROI) for the products and solutions their company creates. They typically want to know the ROI for user-experience efforts, doctor too. However, viagra buy while many UX leaders would love to be able to create a reliable ROI model to justify their team’s resource needs and communicate its value, patient a product’s user experience is so pervasive that trying to determine isolated UX metrics is futile. It’s always difficult to come up with atomic ROI assessments, but this is especially true for the user experience, which, in fact, represents the entire product.

For example, even if a call-center application’s user experience were outstanding and saved five minutes per call, it would not be possible to isolate the direct impact of the UX team that designed the application. Engineering and Product Management have also contributed to the application’s excellence, so what percentage of that savings would it be logical to attribute to User Experience? Conversely, if the intended user experience of that application had instead degraded during development, making calls take longer, to what team should you assign the additional cost of calls? Read More

By Steven Hoober

People have now read and referred to my 2013 column How Do Users Really Hold Mobile Devices? almost too much for my comfort. Why? Because, click since I wrote that column, nurse I have continued to do research, put my findings into practice for real products, written additional articles, and presented on that topic. In the years since then, I’ve learned a lot more about how people hold and touch their phones and tablets—a lot of which I did’t expect. And that’s the problem with my old columns. I made some assumptions that were based on observations of the usage of desktop PCs, standards for older types of interactions, and anecdotes or misrepresented data. However, through my later research and better analysis, I’ve been able to discard all of those erroneous assumptions and reveal the truth.

All too often, I see people referring to my oldest, least-accurate columns on this topic. Sometimes readers combine my obsolete data with other out-of-date information, then draw their own incorrect conclusions. I hope put a stop to that now with this updated overview of everything I know about how people interact with touchscreen devices and how you can use that information to design better digital products. Read More

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