How Much Should You Pay Usability Test Users?
The other day,Gerry McGovern popped me a message with the email: If you’re recruiting people for usability, what typically do you pay them “for their time”? The short answer is “What is their time...
View ArticleThe Benefits of Surrogate Testing
How can design teams gather data from users when their target audience is difficult to access? We often recommend that our clients test surrogate users when the design’s actual users are unavailable....
View ArticleWatch Out For Observer Stamina
The longest usability test session we ever ran: 20 hours. Not in a row. Spread across five days. That’s right. We conducted a usability test where the same participant worked on the same interface for...
View ArticleRolf Molich’s Comparative Usability Evaluation
In my work, I’ve seen that usability testing is an extremely valuable tool. It guides the design of sites, provides information on the expectations of our users, and it gives a way to assess how close...
View ArticleeBayness
eBay shoppers are a peculiar lot. They just ain’t normal, statistically speaking. When we conduct a study, we ask our participants a ton of questions. Some questions prove to be completely unrelated to...
View ArticleThe Power of Persuasive Momentum
We have dozens of clients seeking our help to influence their site’s users and make them take action. Some want us to help them boost conversion rates. Others just want strategies to draw users to...
View ArticleHow Well Does Your Web Site Say Hello?
It would have been very hard to miss Malcolm Gladwell’s new book: Blink. You can find it on every bookseller’s storefront, in a myriad of conversations about human behavior, and on T.V. I saw Gladwell...
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Entertainment Tonight and UNI.edu’s Inukshuk Content
On the home page of the University of Northern Iowa’s web site, prospective students deciding where to attend college can read about Jen. Jen is a current student at UNI who shares some of the reasons...
View ArticleThe 7-11 Milk Experiment: How Does Site Design Affect Revenue?
At UIE, we’ve spent a great deal of time trying to assess how elements of a site design affect revenue. In all of our recent studies of e-commerce sites, we’ve based our research on what we refer to as...
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A myriad of ways to make users sign-in
It’s amazing how many different ways web sites handle sign-in pages. The messaging of the interface, whether or not to sign up for an account, and the HTML elements used are just some of the details...
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Is Unexcelled Food a Good Thing?
I’m curious how many people are interested in eating at a restaurant that serves unexcelled food? Last weekend, I drove by the Century House Restaurant in Peabody, Massachusetts. What struck me was the...
View ArticleSnap Decisions on the Web
What is the smallest amount of time it takes users to form impressions of web sites? In a recent study described in the scientific journal Nature, Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa...
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Branding and the Million Dollar Homepage
This week, marketing expert Seth Godin, has chimed in with his thoughts on the Million Dollar Home Page. The Million Dollar Homepage is an innovative site created by college student Alex Tew to help...
View ArticleThe Effect of Blogging in Your Company
The effect of blogging here at UIE is simple: we’re having more and better conversations with our customers. Case in point: Christine’s recent post about snap decisions started both and online and...
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The Grizzly Man: Disruption that Works
We’ve spent a lot of time researching what types of online advertisements actually work. Not surprisingly, we’ve found a lot of evidence to suggest that users ignore featured advertisements when they...
View ArticleThe Content Page Gets Priority
In a recent article on A List Apart, Derek Powazek, an expert designer and past User Interface Conference speaker, describes how he goes about designing a web site: When I set out to design a website,...
View ArticleThe Amazon Effect
In recent user tests, we’ve noticed something very peculiar. Something I call the Amazon Effect. As we do in many of our studies, we allow our test participants to create their own tasks. This way,...
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The Facebook Controversy: A Lesson About Embraceable Change
This has got to be a designer’s worst nightmare: reading in the New York Times how hundreds of thousands of users are signing petitions for your new features to be removed. That’s exactly what happened...
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Social Networking Sites Renew Interest in User Research
One of the outcomes of the rediculously-fast rise of social networking web sites is that it’s got us asking a lot of questions. Not a day goes by here at UIE where we aren’t discussing MySpace,...
View ArticleSpoolcast Episode #4.1: Where Did The Year Go?
Spoolcast Episode #4.1: Where Did The Year Go? Recorded: December 21, 2006 Part 1 of 3 Duration: 28m 15s Present for the call were Jared Spool, DeWayne Purdy, Lyle Kantrovich, Kyle Pero, and Nate Bolt....
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