The Basics of Recruiting Users for Usability Testing

Usability Testing: Recruiting a Sample of Users

Usability testing involves a sample of test users. These users should possess characteristics that are found in your eventual buyers, users, and/or visitors. Many products and services have a variety of different user types or groups, so it is important to recruit a range of test users to tap into these variations. Ideally, time and budget permitting, when dealing with a product with multiple user groups, you should test them separately to ascertain how they perform on certain tasks and how they feel about the product features specific to their particular group. Continue reading

What is a Usability Engineer?

Usability Engineering, at first glance at least, isn’t a “design” role. Why? Because the primary purpose of a usability engineer is to find problems. They’re the people who conduct studies into how well a user can actually carry out the tasks they want to carry out and find out where the current offering fails to deliver. Continue reading

Top 10 UX Trends for 2015

Simple, effective, and functional design is the key for user experience in 2015. With the rapid growth of mobile technologies and users multitasking more, time is becoming more valuable. Designers will need to be more conscious of designs that deliver content more quickly and without hassle.
Here are the top 10 user experience trends of 2015, made by Megan Wilson. Continue reading

Simplicity, It’s Complicated

“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” — Albert Einstein

Your smart phone would be simpler if it didn’t have a camera. But it would also be a lot less useful. A paint can is a sublimely simple way to store paint. But it’s a dreadful way to interact with paint: It’s hard to open, hard to close, and guaranteed to make a mess every time you pour it.

Simplicity is an obvious virtue, but it is not the ultimate virtue. Sure, the fewer clicks, taps, steps, hurdles, fields, distractions, and doodads in a UI, the better. We UX designers have a whole bag of tricks for simplifying things—consolidating here, eliminating there, shrinking this, submerging that—and 19 times out of 20, the simpler approach is the better approach. Continue reading

[Mito] As pessoas não rolam a página (scroll)

Mito #3: As pessoas não rolam a página (scroll)

Mesmo que as pessoas não usassem o scroll na metade dos anos 90, atualmente é absolutamente natural utilizar a scrollbar dos browsers. Para conteúdos longos, como artigos ou tutoriais, a rolagem permite uma usabilidade muito melhor do que dividir o texto em várias páginas.

Você não tem que espremer tudo no topo da sua página inicial ou sobre a chamada “dobra” (fold), ou seja, o fim da área visível da tela do browser. Para ter certeza que as pessoas irão rolar a página, você precisa seguir alguns princípios de design e prover conteúdo que mantenha o usuário interessado. Também tenha em mente que o conteúdo sobre a “dobra” ainda manterá a maior parte da atenção e também é crucial para os usuários decidirem se sua página é digna de terminar de ser lida ou não. Continue reading