June 7th, 2010
By Christine Perfetti – June 7, 2010
The tasks you create for a usability study are essential for gathering the right data. The tasks determine what you'll test and impacts what parts of the design your team fixes. If you give users the wrong tasks, you risk focusing on the wrong parts of the design and providing your design team with misleading recommendations. Yet, teams often overlook the importance of creating robust tasks for their studies.
When creating tasks for a usability study, you'll want to ask yourself the following questions:
- What are your users' goals with the product? List out the specific actions users most commonly complete with your product.
- What are your business goals? In what way does your product or web site help increase revenue or reduce organizational costs? The best tasks focus on areas of the design crucial to your organization's business goals.
- What are the greatest risks with the design? If there are certain areas of the design where you have little knowledge as to how users interact with it, this is a good place to focus the tests.
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May 26th, 2010
By Christine Perfetti – May 26, 2010
In March 2010, WebEx launched the beta of their new product offering, WebEx Meet. The designers of WebEx Meet intended to create a solution that helps users meet and collaborate with each other in a faster, more efficient way.
I recently had the opportunity to talk about the beta launch with Jon Nakasone, one of the product design leads within the User Experience Group at Cisco WebEx. Jon's group is responsible for bringing innovation to WebEx's online collaboration products and focusing on doing more for the users.
Back in the summer of 2009, Perfetti Media worked with Jon and the WebEx team to conduct a series of usability studies to evaluate the WebEx Meet design. In our interview, I talk with Jon about the launch of the WebEx Meet beta and the WebEx team's approach to design and user research.
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May 19th, 2010
Christine Perfetti – May 19, 2010
At Perfetti Media, we've recently been sending our email newsletter to subscribers on a weekly basis. A few months back, thanks to a recommendation from our good friend Jeff Patton, we signed up for Mad Mimi, an online tool for writing, sending, and tracking online emails to customers. Based on our experience so far, it's clear the design team at Mad Mimi has been thinking about their customers.
This month, we sent our first email newsletter using the Mad Mimi service. Immediately after hitting the "Submit" button to send an email to our subscribers, Mad Mimi responded with the following message:
In addition to congratulating us on sending our first message with Mad Mimi, as a courtesy, the team volunteered to review our message before it was sent to our entire audience. Why is this such an important detail for new customers of Mad Mimi's service?
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May 13th, 2010
By Christine Perfetti – May 13, 2010
Many of our clients come to us requesting usability testing consulting services. One of the reasons they reach out to us is because they think usability testing must be a complex and scientific process. As a result, they'd prefer to have an outside consulting company conduct their tests.
The first thing I tell people who contact me is that usability testing is not a complicated process. It's a technique that anyone can learn with training and lots of practice. In this series of articles, I'll share the essential steps when conducting your first usability tests. In part 1 of the series, I shared the steps for planning your usability tests. In this article, I'll discuss best practices for recruiting your users.
When considering your first usability tests, you'll want to find people who are representative of your target audience. You have a couple of options for doing this. With in-house recruitment, you can assign someone internally to find your users. Or, you can outsource to a reputable recruitment agency. We use both approaches at Perfetti Media and they've worked well for us. Usability Works and AlphaBuzz are two of the organizations we recommend for their recruitment services.
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May 10th, 2010
By Christine Perfetti – May 10, 2010
Many of our clients come to us requesting usability testing consulting services. One of the reasons they reach out to us is because they think usability testing must be a complex and scientific process. As a result, they'd prefer to have an outside consulting company conduct their tests.
The first thing I tell people who contact me is that usability testing is not a complicated process. It's a technique that anyone can learn with training and lots of practice.
Read the rest of this entry »
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