Tag: user research

Burnout: The next challenge for UX design

Posted on by Kim Shepherd in UX

Call it Zoom fatigue, pandemic fatigue, or simply hitting the wall, burnout has set in and its running rampant. Over half of workers report feeling burned out; from elementary school to college, students have had enough; and parents are at their wits ends. It seems like no one is immune. Chronic uncertainty, endless trauma, and the need to keep on keeping on no matter what have created a toxic problem. This is why it’s important for UX designers to understand burnout and identify how it may be factoring into our work right now.

Toward More Gender-Inclusive Form Design

Posted on by Kim Shepherd in UX

Forms are like icebergs. They’re deceivingly more complicated and troublesome than they appear on the surface. Screw up a form’s design and you can stop users in their tracks, preventing them from meeting their intended goals, your business from collecting valuable data, or both. There are a lot of decisions that should go into determining how a form will be look. Since being inclusive and respectful of someone’s identity contributes to better UX, it's important to think through how even the smallest, design choices can be adjusted to help more people feel welcome using your product.

5 Reasons Why Social Media Managers Can Be Assets for UX

Posted on by Kim Shepherd in UX

For many reasons, UX designers are not always able do the user research they desire before making design decisions. While there are always costs for skimping on user research, there are resources to help mitigate limitations, one being your social media manager. Social media and UX design share one important commonality, they are both centered around people. Learn how social media managers can be valuable assets for the UX research process.

A UX Research Report: Connecticut Forest and Park Association

Posted on by Kim Shepherd in Understanding Your Audience

In the last 25 years, business websites have evolved into powerful interactive hubs where users go for far more than brochureware. And as COVID-19 has shown, they are also now the front doors to organizations. Along with social media, they are often the first or only means of interaction people have with a business so, your website's experience better be on point. If it's not, the good news is it's never been easier to learn what it takes to build a good experience for your users. I recently completed a UX research project on ctwoodlands.org, the website for the member-based conservation nonprofit Connecticut Forest and Park Association. Check it out to see one approach for quickly getting the insights and direction you need for a successful redesign.

Usability Testing for an Existing Product

Posted on by Kim Shepherd in Understanding Your Audience

Usability is the measure of how well a person can use a product to achieve an intended goal. In a previous post, I talked about how usability testing should be a key part of any iterative design process, preferably being implemented as early as possible to identify design problems. But usability testing is also an important tool to evaluate existing products before you ever sit down at the drawing board to devise a change or new design.

Wizard of Oz Studies and the Application of Illusion for UX Research

Posted on by Kim Shepherd in Understanding Your Audience

How do you test something that doesn’t exist? The obvious answer is to build it. But what if it’s difficult, time-consuming, and/or expensive to build? You don’t want to risk wasting resources on an untested idea. A common approach that user experience designers (UX) use in such situations is Wizard of Oz studies.

A/B Testing as a UX Research Technique

Posted on by Kim Shepherd in Understanding Your Audience

Redesigning a website is usually about making its experience better. But change doesn’t guarantee better, just different. This is why user experience (UX) designers focus so much on user research. The more you know about user needs, as well as business and other requirements, the more you can eliminate some of that uncertainty about the impact of a new design. However, you will never know for sure how a design choice will perform until it's used with real users in real life. This is a nerve-wracking reality. A UX designer nor most project stakeholders are comfortable taking the risk of just changing something and seeing how it goes. Enter A/B testing.

Leveraging User Research to Get Stakeholder Buy-In

Posted on by Kim Shepherd in Understanding Your Audience

If you’re familiar with user experience (UX) design, then you understand the benefit of user research. It helps you empathize with users, evaluate usability, and determine the user requirements of a project (Baxter, Courage, & Caine, 2015). But what if I told you user research can have another application that can be just as vital to the outcome of a project as user empathy?