Category: User Experience Design
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User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 4: Research as Bullshit
(This is Part 4. Please read Part 1 , Part 2, and Part 3 first.) Okay, in this post I’m going to get a little down and dirty. I’ll show some examples of research which do not seem to really enable a design team to learn more about their users, nor convince stakeholders about correct…
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User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 3: Research as a Political Tool
(This is Part 3. Please read Part 1 and Part 2 first.) Explaining it to the boss. Next time you read an article about a user research success story, ask yourself if the conclusions of that research weren’t just common sense (or at least common sense to good UI designers) to begin with. Ask yourself…
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User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Interlude: Data Interpreted Badly
Here’s a great and succint case study of how user research data can be easily misinterpreted, and a great example about why we should always be suspicious of statistics. The marketing blog at FutureLab (which I do recommend) has a short post today entitled “Study Shows Fear of MySpace Predators is Overblown“. The research paper…
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User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 2: Research as a Design Tool
(This is Part 2. Please read Part 1 first.) An eyetracking “heatmap” showing in red where users’ eyes were pointing for the longest time during a page-view. There is a limit, I think, to what a so-called “empirical” user interface test can tell you. At some point, the results must be interpreted in order to…
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User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 1: Design vs. Science
Research-based design is a noble and widely-admired approach to building good products, especially in the web design field. Like a great many other user experience design firms, at Behavior we conduct research whenever possible, to whatever degree our clients’ budgets and timelines will allow. Our projects frequently involve usability testing (both lab-based and informal), card-sorting…
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When Links Lie
It’s always been perfectly acceptable to me to have an underlined text link in the center of a large graphic, suggesting that the user should click the text link when, in reality, the user can click anywhere on the entire image to the exact same effect. In other words, the text link is something of…
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I am large, I contain multitudes.
Emily Dickinson’s totally awesome MySpace page In which half-baked connections are made between American poetry and Internet social networking. Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is like an 19th-century personal homepage, in which the poet constructs his profile/identity with the stuff he sees in his neighbors, peers, family, friends, and countrymen. He gives shout-outs to his…
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The View From the Other Side of the Microscope
Photo by Liz Danzico The AIGA is currently in the throes of a major web site redesign. Liz Danzico, the AIGA’s Experience Strategy Director, invited me and about 7 other design industry types to attend a card-sorting exercise to help their design team understand how the AIGA’s users think about the types of content and…
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Microsoft Word’s Useless Buttons
It’s not bragging (in fact, it’s probably a little embarassing) for me to say that I am an expert user of Microsoft Word. I can do just about anything I want with it, and I understand most of Word’s idiosyncracies and tricks. Still, the UI has always seemed to get in my way. For example,…
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Reaching Higher Ground with Google Maps
The ever-excellent Google Maps mashup Google Pedometer has recently added an “elevation” feature, allowing you not only to see how far you walked, ran, cycled, or drove, but also to see how far up and down you went along the way. You simply click the “elevation” link and it displays a scrolling iframe with your…