Thoughts on listening to users
We’ve all had this feeling: as dirty dishes pile up in the sink, you become more and more reluctant to deal with them. By the time you’ve run out of clean utensils, the sink has filled up with a formidable Jenga of oily, smelly dishes with crumbs from 2 weeks ago. The ‘Dirty Dishes Phenomenon’ exists in UX, too, except resolving it is not quite as easy as shoving everything into the dishwasher…
For music lovers around the world, Spotify has become the go-to for streaming and sharing music over the past few years. However, with its new music streaming service entering the ring last week, Apple has set out to challenge that market dominance. But will users be convinced to make the switch?
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.
Summer is coming, and that means its time to start booking travel arrangements for that vacation you’ve been daydreaming about. But where to start? We decided to pit two of the biggest online travel planners against each other to see who has the more usable product.
If you pay even a sliver of attention to the entertainment world, you’ve probably heard of Tidal by now. Jay-Z and his famous co-owners (Beyonce, Kanye West, Rihanna, and more) have gone all-out promoting their new music streaming service. Behind all the marketing buzz, though, Tidal is essentially a re-imagined Spotify, and it’s aiming to compete directly with the streaming giant.
Has Tidal reached its goal? We ran a few tests with current Spotify users to find out…
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?
St. Patrick’s Day is a time to celebrate the many contributions of Irish Americans… and to drink lots of beer. To help you pick your pints this 17th, we pitted two of the most popular beer rating apps against each other in a usability faceoff. After a few tests with some real-life beer drinkers, here’s what we found…
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.
Love is in the air…..and, more recently, on the internet. February is the month of Valentine’s Day, and we felt this would be the perfect time to pit two online dating heavyweights, OkCupid & Match.com, against each other to see who has the most usable product. We ran a few tests with real, single men and women, and here’s what we found…
Google has unrolled its new security solution to replace the old CAPTCHA tests – what does that mean for usability?
Build a better product with our FREE trial that includes FIVE user testing videos with FULL features!
