Research: Usability Testing

Metrics are the signals that show whether your UX strategy is working. Using metrics is key to tracking changes over time, benchmarking against iterations of your own site or application or those of competitors, and setting targets.

Although most organizations are tracking metrics like conversion rate or engagement time, often they do not tie these metrics back to design decisions. The reason? Their metrics are too high level. A change in your conversion rate could relate to a design change, a promotion, or something that a competitor has done. Time on site could mean anything. Read More

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our expert panel discusses the importance of ResearchOps to the UX community. Our panel begins by defining ResearchOps and describing the efforts of the nascent ResearchOps community to establish a common understanding of ResearchOps.

Our panelists then explore the many challenges practitioners of the discipline of ResearchOps face—for example, issues they encounter in different types of organizations and in agile and Lean development environments. Our experts also consider the challenges of global user research. Finally, our panel cautions against trying to generalize ResearchOps across the larger UX community. Read More

What is a confidence interval? I wanted to know that recently and turned to one of my favorite books: Measuring the User Experience, by Tom Tullis and Bill Albert. And here’s what they say:

“Confidence intervals are extremely valuable for any usability professional. A confidence interval is a range that estimates the true population value for a statistic.”

Then they go on to explain how you calculate a confidence interval in Excel. Which is fine, but I have to admit that I wasn’t entirely sure that once I’d calculated it, I really knew what I’d done or what it meant. So I trawled through various statistics books to gain a better understanding of confidence intervals, and this column is the result. Read More