Posts tagged tech

Getting to know your users better

The great tumblelog, 52 Weeks of UX, has a good selection of ways to get to know users and their behavior better:

“Luckily, there are many research techniques you can employ to gain a better understanding of your users and their behavior. Any combination of these techniques will help you get started:

  • User interviews - guided conversations with existing or potential users  to help you understand their preferences and attitudes
  • Contextual inquiry - combining direct user observation with an interview that takes place in the users environment in order to better understand their work environment, the problems they are trying to solve and other related preferences
  • Surveys - a clear set of questions distributed to a wide audience in order to gather results that can help validate existing data and personas
  • Card sorting - a grouping task for individuals or small groups used to establish common patters and identify areas of confusion
  • Usability testing - the process of performing a series of specific tests on a site or product to reveal potential usability problems and identify solutions to address them.”

By the way, I discovered optimalsort, which is a really easy and fun to use online card sorting program. It’s free for basic use and about $100/month if you want to have more than 30 cards or more than 10 people use it. Worth checking out.

    I think the ipad + iphone interaction for Scrabble is brilliant. Hope to see more products doing this in the future.

    Yelp Makes Big Changes in Effort to End Extortion Claims

    Glad they’re finally doing something and hope this is enough. In talking to one business owner in SF, she told me she was called every day by Yelp asking her to advertise (!) By the way she described it Yelp sounded like the tech mafia.

    I’m sure it’s a challenge to identify what reviews are fake. That said, they’ve now attracted so much ill-will in the business community with this + the aggressive sales tactics, it’s going to be a challenge to get it back. I hope they do.

    Mashable