Therese Fessenden is a Senior Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group and host of the NN/g UX Podcast. Her research focuses on understanding human behavior, attitudes, and expectations in order to better orchestrate system and service design strategies.
No design is perfect on the first try. Combining iteration, parallel design, and competitive testing helps teams move quickly, explore broadly, and make confident, evidence-based design decisions.
Personas and archetypes are different ways of communicating the same user research data. Archetypes describe categories of users; personas humanize those categories to illustrate real impact.
A SWOT Analysis is a framework to analyze the position of a company or product experience relative to others in the market. Its four quadrants offer prompts to help teams identify specific factors that may impact their success.
There is more than one way to conduct a competitive evaluation. This video describes the difference between a competitive review and competitive research.
NPS is a loyalty metric that correlates well with perception of usability, is easy to understand and administer, but has limitations for understanding and evaluating UX when used in isolation.
By first working independently on a problem and then converging to share insights, teams can leverage the benefits of both work styles, leading to rapid data analysis, diverse ideas, and high-quality designs.
