User story maps solve the user’s problems in form of a discussion. Your job as a product manager or user experience consultant should be to make the world better through user-centric products. Essentially solving the user’s problems.
Kaizen-UX
How Many Test Users? 3… 5… 10? Try 46!
Quick win
Yes, this is yet another blog post on number of test participants, but this time it is based on very large samples and statistical wizardry. The total length of remote user research videos recorded by the WhatUsersDo platform in 2014 adds up to a jaw-dropping 2861 hours 03 minutes and 43 seconds. (It would take 120 days to watch them, if you would be watching user videos 24/7 without a break.) The core research for this article is based on 375 videos. After statistically analysing those results, I must say that 5 users is way too low. Most of the time you end up finding about 31% or less of all possible insights. How do I know what is the number of all possible insights? Because we conducted a very large-scale study, and found no unique insights, everything was repeated at least twice. As a result I have created “the big table of problems, research answers and number of tests to solve them“.
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5 reasons why you should be skeptical about A/B testing
Quick win
A/B tests are not evil incarnate, but their predominance and unquestioned authority made me write this article. After giving you the five reasons to take A/B testing with a grain of salt, I will show you how to tame those tests using my triple testing combo method.
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Transcendence: SEO becomes UX
Quick win
While not as shocking as human–machine transcendence depicted in the sci-fi drama written by Jack Paglen, the transcendence of SEO to UX is happening now. In the following blog post I will show how UX becomes an increasingly large part of the ranking in Google, and thus a vital part of Seo packages for small businesses. It also shows the direction where the world’s leading search engine goes, and that direction is the largely user experience based ranking. At the end I will write briefly about the current user experience signals in Google ranking. I can’t and don’t want to give a checklist, instead I want SEO experts to embrace user-centred thinking. If you would like more SEO information go here.
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The 4D User Experience Map
Communicating the results of UX research
While conducting through UX research, one of the greatest challenges is communicating the results without wasting the time of stakeholders. I needed a high impact deliverable that visualizes how well user needs are being met. The maps metaphor was convenient because I had to show how the users expect to go about reaching a goal using well paved roads, shortcuts and pitfalls set by an app or site. From the usability perspective maps, even multi-dimensional maps are nothing new.
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