Thoughts on listening to users
In engineering, the signal-to-noise ratio refers to the relative strength of an electrical signal compared to the strength of the background noise. Too much noise, and the signal can become difficult or impossible to decipher. Signal-to-noise ratio is an important consideration in design, too.
Surveys are everywhere. Millions go out every day, to people responding as customers, employees, citizens, members, attendees, and every other capacity. Seismic decisions rest on survey data; million-dollar sums hang in the balance. So much effort is put towards driving up response rates, and yet so little attention is paid to getting higher-quality data.
What are the obstacles to improving the quality of survey data? And how can UX help to solve these problems?
The idea behind task-based usability testing is that any application’s user experience is comprised of various steps along the user’s journey, each of which must be optimized for simplicity and ease of use to guide the user to his or her end goal.
Each task, then, while contributing to a cohesive whole, is also a unique opportunity to create an intuitive and seamless interaction for the user. It is in finding where we fail to do this that we are able to improve our websites and applications.
We got together with UX designer Mariano Andres Garcia and UX professor Guiseppe Getto to talk about how you can optimize your usability research to get the most insight out of it and get beyond the obvious issues to see the more subtle usability problems. Here is a recap of the Q&A from the webinar.
UX folks like to bandy around the word “delight” in talking about experience design, but I bet most of them have never heard a grown man literally squeal in jubilant shock in response to a web interaction.
What does the future hold for the UX field? We talked to East Carolina University’s Guiseppe Getto, a UX professor, researcher, and consultant, about teaching UX and looking into the field’s future in the hands of today’s students.
At TryMyUI, we believe that usability testing informs good web design. Even the best UX designers need to take a step back and view their project from the end user’s perspective, simply because as humans we tend to get caught up in our own biases.
We also believe that usability testing is one of the most valuable things a company can do for itself to drive up conversion rates and communicate the right message to visitors.
Simply put, it’s a tool that results in a better outcome on all sides.
TryMyUI is happy to announce the release of our new mobile usability testing app in beta. Download it for free on your phone’s app store!
We talked to Derek Olson of Foraker Labs and Chandika Bhandari of Seattle AppLab in an hour-long webinar (view the full recording here) November 4th about the challenges of designing usable mobile sites and apps and our solutions for improving mobile UX. This is a recap of the Q&A segments.
Consumers now spend more time on their mobile devices than on their computers, and the world of online commerce is seeing the effects. So are you optimizing your online presence for mobile?
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