At Sparkbox, I was the project manager and lead user experience strategist for the redesign of psaairlines.com, a wholly-owned subsidiary of American Airlines.
I was responsible for:
At Sparkbox, I led a user experience project for a leading academic medical center. For this project, I performed the following tasks:
Read the article at SeeSparkbox.com.
I have a bit of a side project going on, both offline and online. I'm taking classes to learn how to do garden design, and I'm blogging the journey of applying what I learn to my own yard. Young Urban Gardens will document the long process of transforming my front and back yards into a beautiful gardens that have zero traditional grass.
If you're interested in following along, check out my garden design blog or read more about my landscaping project.
Most in the digital community are already familiar with traditional usability testing—where five to 10 users are recruited to think aloud while they use a website to accomplish tasks. But, there are even more techniques in the UX professional’s arsenal to gather usability metrics and insights. One very valuable (and very affordable) technique is to use an unmoderated first click test to run a design comparison study.
In this article, I'll explain why you need to comparative test your designs, and how to get started.
The usability testing tool marketplace is booming—every day there’s some new service or app that allows you to plug in your tasks and run a test on a panel of participants anywhere in the world. You can get hundreds of responses for quantitative research or watch video recordings of a handful of participants taking your test and thinking aloud into the camera. With all of these options, why would you still usability test the “old” way by moderating your own test with five to 10 participants from your user base?
Here’s why:
In my experience, the tendency of the UX person, designer, or information architect is to provide clients with a complete roadmap for the ideal website experience. Their vision is often grand—nobody hires them to think small. So, they suggest great content ideas. Ideas that excite a team at first blush, but can feel totally overwhelming to execute.
Often, content can be a major hurdle, whether the client is creating a new website or redesigning an existing one. Clients often wonder, Who is going to write all the copy? When will we shoot on-brand photos and create compelling graphics? How are we going to produce great video content? Will we manage to get this done by our launch date, within budget and with an internal team that always seems smaller than what we need?
Enter the content MVP.