Recruiting participants for research is expensive. It’s also rife with problems: Are these people really who they say they are? Are they actually paying attention? Or is the data from some survey farm where people click through and make money? AI is disrupting UX research. But the disruption is leading to more software, not less.
Should the sample size n be greater than 30? If you’ve taken any introductory statistics course or an AP statistics class (or helped your child with it), you’ve encountered the n ≥ 30 rule. The “magic number 5” rule we’ve written extensively about applies (with its important caveats) to problem discovery for usability testing. But the
It’s hard to collect data for UX research, and once you have it, you have to clean it. In a simpler world, all respondents would be honest and focused on providing high-quality information rather than maximizing income, but that’s not the world we live in. From past research, we estimate the prevalence of cheating on
“That design will never work.” You may have had that thought before you even ran your first participant in a usability test. If you’ve seen enough users struggle and conducted enough usability tests, then you probably have some idea about how well or poorly a task attempt may go for prototypes or even commercially available
Satisfaction is different than ease of use. But they are both attitudes. We provided the conceptual foundation for what satisfaction is, how it differs from perceived ease of use, and how both can be collected at the overall product level (also called the study level) or at the task level. So, while we know they
“Satisfaction” is used rather broadly in vernacular speech. We can feel satisfied with a meal, a movie, or a moment. Our feeling of satisfaction blends utility (it fed me), affect (I enjoyed it), and expectation (it lived up to or exceeded what I wanted). The dessert, the movie ending, or the moment can all be
Having a representative sample is ideal when making inferences about your customer or user population. In practice, it can be difficult to recruit the right proportion of respondents, leaving your sample out of balance with the population. One way to adjust for being off balance is to weight the data you collected to get the
At MeasuringU®, we don’t just use UX metrics—we create them. But what have we created, and what have we just used or extended? Across our combined careers, we (Jeff and Jim) have published 16 psychometrically qualified UX metrics (both creating original and modifying existing questionnaires) plus a method for combining prototypical usability metrics, and we
Human research moderators aren’t going away. Despite technological advancements, such as remote unmoderated testing (with and without thinking aloud) and AI moderators, a live researcher asking questions to a live person will always be needed. Technological innovations are less likely to render things obsolete than make them more specialized (like Internet > TV > Radio).
Is there a misalignment in skills in the UX profession? Specifically, when UX managers are hiring, is there a misalignment in what applicants and current practitioners report doing and the skills managers need? In a previous article, we did a deep dive into what UX practitioners reported doing in the 2024 UXPA salary survey, tracking
