NYTECH "Measuring Your User Experience Design"

Editor's Notes

• #9: Livescribe
• #19: Business question: How are users actually viewing your content (in what order, for how long and in what specific pattern or pathways)?Audience question: Have you wondered if critical links, buttons or content messaging is being viewed on a critical page?Description: this methodology is very useful when trying to determine why certain homepage metrics from analytics programs are of concern (not clicking on value proposition element…etc.)The respondent sits at a specialized computer screen and undergoes a simple calibration sequence. Respondent is given a stimulus question or task (active or passive) (show homepage for set period of time 15 seconds)System tracks eye pathways and fixations and produces a data file from that task.Important things to know about eye-tracking Tobii not designed for web sites or changing visual stimulus)This makes actual testing of web navigation (changing from page to page) very complex to actually analyze and not accurateVery effective for single stimulus presentations of fixed durationsExcellent for detailed analysis of home pages or critical landing pages and forms Very insightful for assessing impact of advertizing on homepage visual scanning.
• #20: Business question: Is anyone working on a major (large-scale) site launch or redesign that your company depends on for survival?
• #22: Audience question: “How many of you have a project at the point where it is ready for major commitment? (round A, new release, major new upgrade) I have a web site, software or product and I am about to commit major funding or resources to next phase of developmentDo I have usability problems with the user experience that are basically show stoppers Users cannot download the application Users cannot log in Users cannot set up a profile pageUsers cannot navigate to critical content 1-3 critical tasks in 60 min.
• #24: Business question: Do any of you have new development team that has minimal UX / Usability experience? Is your team employing best practices and are they aware of the key UX and Usability performance issues that an effective solution must meet.Description: A highly experienced usability / UI design expert conducts a structured audit of your system or product and rates the system on best practices and estimated performanceInterview and select an expert who has direct experience in your product category and sectorExpert gathers information from your development team and conducts structured audit based on predetermined best practices. Expert presents findings to your team (sometimes not a happy experience for UX design teams without knowledge of formal UCD methods.Very effective early in development and can be repeated with updates at less cost.
• #25: Business problem: How do I organize information like content, navigation, overall IA so that users understand it?Description: this is an automated version of the classic card sorting studies where you give users a pile of index cards with your content descriptions on them and ask them to sort the cards into groups according to how they relate to the content. Example: If I have a bunch of content categories how do I determine what the groupings are and the high level navigation labels? Lets say you have a site selling women’s underwear and you what to create a navigation structure that matches the users mental model. So do you organize the site by type of underwear on top level and styles, colors, or do you organize the site navigation by life style like (athletic, everyday, intimate) and they by type of article color, and price. Respondents are invited to an online study via email.When they agree they encounter a screen with a list of labels or terms in one column and are asked to sort the terms into groups they find organizationally relevant. When they are finished you can give them another card sort of just finish the study. When the required number of respondents are finished with the card sort you can view the dataCard sorting data is analyzed through the application of cluster analysis (not that easy to understand but very useful)