Thoughts on listening to users

Author Archives: Farhad Farzaneh

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How to Talk to Your Users

By Farhad Farzaneh | Published: July 13, 2011
We met Diane Loviglio, a user experience researcher at Mozilla, at a recent SF  Bay Area meetup, and she shared some insights on the traditional Recruit-Observe-Interview-Navigate user testing process. 1. Recruit your target audience.  Diane suggests not talking to just anyone or everyone.  Instead, recruit people based on “behaviors” or “personas” versus standard demographics. [...]
Posted in Practice, TryMyUi | 1 Comment

Tips On Writing Usability Tests When You Need Them

By Farhad Farzaneh | Published: June 2, 2011
Previously, we wrote about some tips on how to write a good usability test on this blog.  We have now incorporated some of those tips into a tips page that you can access whenever you are creating a new usability test or editing one you have previously created, on the upper right hand corner of [...]
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Tips for writing a usability test

By Farhad Farzaneh | Published: June 2, 2011
To date at TryMyUi we have  reviewed many thousands of usability test videos based upon tests created by our customers so we’ve learned what types of questions and tasks elicit good test results.  Writing a good usability test is not something that is intuitive, but with a bit of thought and planning, it’s easy to [...]
Posted in Practice, TryMyUi | 2 Comments

Video Indexing!

By Farhad Farzaneh | Published: May 20, 2011
TryMyUi adds video-indexing to quickly mark task positions in the video, and indicate the task duration.
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Remedies for “Oops – I made a mistake in setting up my use test”

By Farhad Farzaneh | Published: May 6, 2011
We added a couple of features recently to handle the oops case.  This happens when you set up a use test, send it out to testers, and then realize that you had made a mistake.  Previously, once a test had been commissioned, it was like a letterin the mailbox – it was in the system and [...]
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Don’t count on people to read instructions

By Farhad Farzaneh | Published: April 26, 2011
While user testing on trymyui is easy,  it’s even easier for us to test our own design because each test that comes back reflects whether we’ve done a good job with how we display our instructions.  In a trymyui test, the test creator establishes a “frame-of-mind” for the tester, such as, “Imagine you’re going on [...]
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Create High-Fidelity Wireframes for UX Testing with Justinmind

By Farhad Farzaneh | Published: April 14, 2011
Last month, we announced a new feature in TryMyUI that optimizes user feedback for prototypes and wireframes.  Wireframes traditionally lack many of the design and visual elements that real people outside your project team rely on to make sense of a website or application.  This poses a special challenge when it comes to usability testing [...]
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More confusing UI from a very popular service

By Farhad Farzaneh | Published: October 14, 2010
Quora is a very popular new service from the ex-CTO of facebook.  Here’s an image of part of the main page: The top bar shows an entry box followed by what looks like a button with the text “add question”.  One assumes the two are related because there’s they’re in the same black box,  so the [...]
Posted in Gallery | 2 Comments

UI Fail from the UI Gurus

By Farhad Farzaneh | Published: September 28, 2010
Here’s a User Interface failure courtesy of Apple. Note that the window cannot be expanded (why?).  So how exactly are we supposed to know what the “Convert Selected Simplified C…” refers to.  I’m not sure why any dialog windows are designed to be unexpandable – what’s the point of this constraint? I guess on the bright side, [...]
Posted in Gallery | 1 Comment

What leads to Why

By Farhad Farzaneh | Published: September 23, 2010
Earlier we wrote about the difference between quantitative usability measurements, which answer the question: What are users doing? and qualitative measurements (for example, as provided by TryMyUi), which answer Why are they doing what they are doing? In this article Jeff Sauro provides a good example.
Posted in Practice | Leave a comment
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