Challenged by Choosing The Color of Your Kanken Backpack? I Want to Help
I wanted to give my boyfriend a Kanken backpack as a gift. I know he always wanted one, so it should be a very safe gift. But what color? When asked, he said he wasn’t sure.
Could I help? I asked myself.
What can I do to help him make a decision of the color of this Kanken backpack without rushing him, and more importantly, while making him that he knew it was his own decision?
Turning "Inappropriate" Questions in Usability Testing to Meaningful Ones
A few years ago, I went to a UX training day-long conference on usability testing led by Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g), the leading research & consulting group in the UX industry. This month, I was luckily invited to do an intro-level training at my company on usability testing for some research assistants who are interested in the UX world. I decided to review my notes from the NN/g training.
The training would be an overview of UX interviews and usability testing. There is one part that covers interview techniques. From my NN/g conference notes, I found a few questions that were “inappropriate to ask” during interviews as a UX researcher. I decided to use them as examples to walk through, while I offer suggestions to improve the questions. I’d like to share my writing and thoughts here.
1. “What do you think of the colors and fonts?”
Check design standards when designing; use other tasks to find out if the colors and fonts work, like a comparison.
Shall I Complain, They’re Already Wearing Headphones
Someday from five years ago, I was working on an assignment in a computer lab at UC San Diego. There was always a sign on the door reminding us not to talk or eat at any time in the lab. The lab was normally really quiet and clean.
Until it wasn’t quiet anymore. I heard music being played in the room. I turned my head around to see what happened.
Nothing in particular, I thought. Students scattered in the lab were either working on homework with serious looks on their faces or chilling with their headphones on. Where could that sound come from?
I listened in more closely to locate the source of the sound. I scoped down the target range to one guy, who was sitting a few seats to my left near the aisle. He obviously had his big headset on though.
Weird.
"You know you can mute your phone, right?"
A classmate in my class kept snapping photos of the professor’s PowerPoint slides during class. Without muting her phone.