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Why you should use survey weights in UX research
I love to espouse why human factors psychology is a great path for UX research education. That said, I recognize one blind spot in my training: survey weighting. In human factors, we often rely on experimental design to mitigate concerns about individual differences and biases in our data. In UX research, we don’t often have…
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Learn Quantitative UX Research: Self-study resources
Quantitative UX research is a growing sub-field of UX research. Whether you’re a qualitative UX researcher looking to broaden your skills or someone from a related field looking to pivot, it can be hard to know how to build your quantitative UX research skills. This shares four pillars to learn quantitative UX research and some…
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SQL is for all UX researchers
TL;DR: UX researchers should learn SQL to get their own participant lists and better understand company metrics and product questions. When learning SQL, keep in mind that you have to learn the syntax but also the unique ways your organization has built their data infrastructure. In all tech companies, and even most companies outside of…
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The Survey Viability Score: My first question in survey planning
tl;dr: When planning a successful survey, ensure the number of invites you need to send is smaller than the number of invites you have available to send by computing the survey viability score yourself or using this calculator. Early in my career, there were a few questions I didn’t always remember to ask when planning…
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Your survey is your user experience
When was the last time you got a confusing survey from a company or app? If you’re a UX researcher, did you screenshot to discuss with your coworkers (like I always do)? Here is an in-app survey I got from TikTok that made me feel confused: why were the emojis in black and white? What…
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Cognitive Survey Tests: Faster methods for wider adoption
TL;DR (Be sure to see part one in this series to determine when you should incorporate a cognitive test in your survey project. Hint, you probably should.) Most researchers I know haven’t conducted a cognitive survey test. In academia, they’re left to specialized survey psychometricians. In industry, researchers typically don’t have time to consider running…
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Bad research doesn’t stink
Introduction Why does UX research face the prospect of democratization, while other product functions do not? This question is just the type of problem we as researchers should tackle. By knowing the answer, it unlocks some strategy for how to contend with the threat or opportunity of research democratization. Research democratization Unless you’ve been quietly…
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Can longer task times for users be a good thing?
When is a task time supposed to be longer, rather than shorter, for an optimal user experience? The answer to this question comes down to what user activities we define as “tasks”. The article proposes a way of categorizing user activities that enables us to define if time-spent in an activity should be optimally shorter…
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Cognitive Survey Tests: When UX researchers need to do them
This is part one that explains when and why to do a cognitive survey test. Jump to part two if you just want to learn how to conduct one. You’re a UX researcher creating a survey. You’ve done qualitative research so you know the areas you want to measure quantitatively. You’ve aligned your stakeholders so…
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Why “strategic” research needs a redefinition
tl;dr Strategy/tactics definitions conflate generative/evaluative research with large/small scope research. Evaluative work can be impactful at a strategic level when it appropriately covers the scope of a system. Generative work can be tactical when it’s constrained to be too focused within existing product offerings. Background It’s a common conversation lately in UX that teams need…
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What does a quantitative UX researcher do?
I often get asked the question, what does a quantitative UX researcher actually do? There’s no single, correct answer. Rather than discussing educational backgrounds, tools, or methods as others have done before (1, 2, 3), this post outlines the thinking behind the types of projects I’ve typically done as a quantitative UX researcher (UXR). A…
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Analytics are leaving out user intent
And UX benchmarking can help Note: this article was originally published in UX Collective on Medium.com. tl;dr —With log-based analytics alone, we can’t see users that want to start a task but cannot find it. This leads us to overcount success rates. With behavioral UX benchmarking, we understand a user’s intent so we know how…
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The Single Usability Metric (SUM) — A completion rate conundrum
Note: this was originally published in UX Collective on Medium.com and is now published more formally in the proceedings for Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting. TL;DR — In the SUM benchmarking method, the calculation of completion rates creates a bias for completion rates which artificially inflates all ‘good’ scores and marks some ‘poor’…