Freescale conducted extensive research with existing non-Windows netbooks and learned that both the user interface and form factor issues co-mingle in these devices. They approached the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) industrial design department and asked them to work on concepts that address issues for specific markets: tweens, teens and soccer moms.
Two sponsored courses that participated in this project. What follows is the class’ process for developing the initial framework and vision for a new graphical user interface to run on top of an existing operating system (like Linux) that can take advantage of an ARM CPU chipset on something akin to a netbook or a smartbook.
Case Study: Freescale Netbook Design at SCAD
The list of questions on this page is a compilation of the questions and answers the author has heard most often about the use of questionnaires in usability engineering and includes answers to the following questions:
- What is a questionnaire?
- Are there different kinds of questions?
- What are the advantages of using questionnaires in usability research?
- What are the disadvantages?
- How do questionnaires fit in with other HCI evaluation methods?
- What is meant by reliability?
- What is meant by validity?
- Should I develop my own questionnaire?
- What’s wrong with putting a quick-and-dirty questionnaire together?
- Factual-type of questionnaires are easy to do, though, aren’t they?
- What’s the difference between a questionnaire which gives you numbers and one that gives you free text comments?
- Can you mix factual and opinion questions, closed and open ended questions?
- How do you analyse open-ended questionnaires?
- What is a Likert-style questionnaire? One with five response choices to each statement, right?
- How can I tell if a question belongs to a Likert scale or not?
- How many response options should there be in a numeric questionnaire?
- How many anchors should a questionnaire have?
- My respondents are continually complaining about my questionnaire items. What can I do?
- What other kinds of questionnaires are there?
- Should favourable responses always be be checked on the left (or right) hand side of the scale?
- Is a long questionnaire better than a short one? How short can a questionnaire be?
- Is high statistical reliability the ‘gold standard’ to aim for?
- What’s the minimum and maximum figure for reliability?
- Can you tell if a respondent is lying?
- Why do some questionnaires have sub-scales?
- How do you go about identifying component sub-scales?
- How much can I change wordings by in a standardised opinion questionnaire?
- What’s the difference between a questionnaire and a checklist?
- Where can I find out more about questionnaires?
Questionnaires in Usability Engineering- A list of FAQs
This article is for you if you are interested in online survey capability and are wondering how to go about choosing an online vendor.
The article answers the question in two parts. First some context about surveying is set and the second part provides tips to about points to consider when buying a survey solution.
Eight Tips For Choosing An Online Survey Provider
Their Human Centered Design Toolkit is a free innovation guide for NGOs and social enterprises.
Human-Centered Design is a process used for decades to create new solutions for companies and organizations. Human-Centered Design can help you enhance the lives of people. This process has been specially-adapted for organizations like yours that work with people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Human-Centered Design (HCD) will help you hear people’s needs in new ways, create innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind.
The Toolkit is divided into four sections that can be downloaded individually or together:
- The Introduction will give an overview of HCD and help you understand how it might be used alongside other methods.
- The Hear guide will help your design team prepare for fieldwork and understand how to collect stories that will serve as insight and inspiration. Designing meaningful and innovative solutions that serve your customers begins with gaining deep empathy for their needs, hopes and aspirations for the future. The Hear booklet will equip the team with methodologies and tips for engaging people in their own contexts to delve beneath the surface.
- The Field Guide and Aspirations cards are a complement to the Hear guide; these are the tools your team will take with them in order to conduct research.
- The Create guide will help your team work together in a workshop format to translate what you heard from people into frameworks, opportunities, solutions, and prototypes. During this phase, you will move from concrete to more abstract thinking in identifying themes and opportunities and back to the concrete with solutions and prototypes.
- The Deliver guide will help catapult the top ideas you have created toward implementation. The realization of solution includes rapid revenue and cost modeling, capability assessment, and implementation panning. The activities offered in this phase are meant to complement your organization’s existing implementation processes and may prompt adaptations to the way solutions are typically rolled out.
IDEO’s Human Centered Design Toolkit
Download individual sections
Download the complete HCD toolkit (PDF, 30.5 mb)
Download the field guide (PDF, 820 kb)
Published in the ‘Ergonomics in Design’ journal in 1997. He collected and created this list of 34 thumb rules (given below in order of priority) that were found particularly useful during the design process by colleagues working in the human-computer interface (HCI) design field.
- Know thy user, and YOU are not thy user.
- Things that look the same should act the same.
- Everyone makes mistakes, so every mistake should be fixable.
- The information for the decision needs to be there when the decision is needed.
- Error messages should actually mean something to the user, and tell the user how to fix the problem.
- Every action should have a reaction.
- Don’t overload the user’s buffers.
- Consistency, consistency, consistency.
- Minimize the need for a mighty memory.
- Keep it simple.
- The more you do something, the easier it should be to do.
- The user should always know what is happening.
- The user should control the system. The system shouldn’t control the user. The user is the boss, and the system should show it.
- The idea is to empower the user, not speed up the system.
- Eliminate unnecessary decisions, and illuminate the rest.
- If I made an error, let me know about it before I get into REAL trouble.
- The best journey is the one with the fewest steps. Shorten the distance between the user and their goal.
- The user should be able to do what the user wants to do.
- Things that look different should act different.
- You should always know how to find out what to do next.
- Don’t let people accidentally shoot themselves.
- Even experts are novices at some point. Provide help.
- Design for regular people and the real world.
- Keep it neat. Keep it organized.
- Provide a way to bail out and start over.
- The fault is not in thyself, but in thy system.
- If it is not needed, it’s not needed.
- Color is information.
- Everything in its place, and a place for everything.
- The user should be in a good mood when done.
- If I made an error, at least let me finish my thought before I have to fix it.
- Cute is not a good adjective for systems.
- Let people shape the system to themselves, and paint it with their own personality.
- To know the system is to love it.
Expert Ratings of Usability Maxims (article access requires purchase)
The million dollar ARF Foundations of Quality study conducted in Oct/Nov 2008 involved over 100,000 interviews across 17 different online research panel providers, 1,000 RDD telephone interviews and 1,500 interviews conducted via mail panels. As the ARF continues to release results, the author shares more insight on how online and RDD phone research compare.
How do online and RDD phone research compare?
The following gear is Jan Chip Chase’s personal recommendation for someone wanting to put together a field research starter kit. It’s not comprehensive, it won’t all be right for you, but it’s the gear that has stood up to the rigors of the field and has delivered time after time.
His list covers:
- Luggage
- Camera Kit (Nikon)
- Camera Kit (Canon)
- Photo Management
- Travel Printer
- Audio
Research Equipment Overview
The International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction (IJMHCI) brings together a comprehensive collection of research articles from international experts on the design, evaluation, and use of innovative handheld, mobile, and wearable technologies.
This journal will also consider issues associated with the social and/or organizational impacts of such technologies. Emerging theories, methods, and interaction designs are included and complemented with case studies, which demonstrate the practical application of these new ideas.
International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction (IJMHCI)
As a user experience consultant, a fair amount of time at the beginning of a project reading any existing user research reports. These reports help understand the user research history of the project (i.e. the user research done in the past, the outcome and what, if anything was identified for further exploration). For small and relatively simple projects these reports are fairly easy to thread together. But for large and more complex projects that involve multiple user experience professionals conducting user experience activities in parallel, tracing the user research history just six months after the project is complicated and can sometimes be challenging.
Here are the six data points that the author recommends including in a user research report to help build a user research history for the project.
User Research Reports: Six Data Points to Create a ‘User Research History’
When researchers ask for a nationally representative (”nat. rep.”) sample, they mean that the population of interest is the entire population of the country in question and that the sample should reflect this in its structure. At its best then the nat. rep. sample will ‘look like’ the population irrespective of how it is viewed. The numbers of men vs. women will match the national proportions, the percentage in each age group or each region will exactly match the population etc. On non-demographic measures (such as product ownership or psychographics) the sample should match the population.
What is National Representative Sample?