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UX practitioners, both consultants and in house, sometimes conduct research. Be it usability testing or user research with a generative goal, research requires planning. To make sure product managers, developers, marketers and executives (let's call them stakeholders) act on UX research results, planning must be crystal clear, collaborative, fast and digestible.

The new business meeting was going swimmingly-that is, until the client started asking questions about our design process. Then we unleashed our lexicon of specialized user experience (UX) research terminology. Why should we do that thing you called...what was it, task analysis? We'd like some of those personas. They're important, right? What the heck is contextual inquiry?! As mental models flew about the room, I realized how hard it is for clients to understand the true value of UX research. As much as I'd like to tell my clients to go read The Elements of User Experience and call me back when they're done, that won't cut it in a professional services environment. The whole team needs a common language and a philosophy that's easy to grok.

If you've ever run a research or usability test, you'll know they can be tricky to facilitate. After all, you're dealing with people; and people come with a whole host of existing preconceptions, personalities, emotions, and experiences. One thing that can help you to gain more honest and thereby useful feedback from research participants is, in fact, to lie to them.

Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences

Describes the main types of user research in plain english

T-commerce tastes like it sounds. It's the use of television to facilitate transactions over the Internet. Research by PayPal in late 2011 found 49% of TV subscribers have interest in purchasing goods and services through their television or other "screen" like smartphones and tablets. At least 11 t-commerce initiatives are taking advantage of connected TV's transactional capabilities today

This Sample Size Calculator is presented as a public service of Creative Research Systems survey software. You can use it to determine how many people you need to interview in order to get results that reflect the target population as precisely as needed. You can also find the level of precision you have in an existing sample.

There has been increasing interest in our professional community around the research that informs our designs. Traditional user research may [...] This UX Show & Tell DC event with John Douglass took place on January 28th. This was a roundtable discussion [...] UXCamp DC is an ad-hoc unconference and is part of the larger BarCamp movement.

UX researchers are exposed to a broad cross-section of people and personalities, especially when it comes to conducting user tests. Frequently, the people we encounter are willing, helpful participants to the research process - but what happens when respondents aren't so willing or helpful? Originally shared by Beth @ July 12, 2011

Question: How many users do you need to test with for a usability test? Answer 1: = 5 users (Jakob Nielsen and Thomas Landauer, 1993). Answer 2: = 15 users (Laurie Faulkner, 2004), PDF file. So, which is it, 5 or 15?

With another month in the rear view mirror, retailers are beginning the push for the 2011 holiday season. Those retailers should take note of a study recently released by Motista. The findings reveal that only 18 percent of consumers have an emotional connection to their retailers.

Nielsen Norman paper

Today, customers can interact with your storefront in various digital places--desktop, mobile, and tablet--and expect experiences tailored to where they do so. You can no longer simply build a website and assume your digital job is done. Here's how to build a digital strategy that makes sense across platforms

As a social psychologist, I'm interested in how social commerce works. Not for academic reasons, but for a purely practical reason. Understanding why it makes commercial sense to help people to connect where they buy and buy where they connect provides businesses with a strategic advantage; the opportunity to reap the rewards of a powerful insight-led social commerce strategy, as opposed to merely deploying social commerce as a set of tactical tools. Jumping to the conclusion of a rather long post, I think that a psychologically informed understanding of how social commerce works points to the possibility of six particularly effective social commerce strategies.

Inforgraphic on social shopping behaviors & stats

Talk by Janice Fraser at Startup Lessions Learned Conference in May 201. Case Study discussion from Cooper - Tim McCoy - Director, Integrated Product Development, Cooper Case Study: TheLadders - Jeff Gothelf - Director of User Experience, TheLadders Case Study: LUXr NYC - Josh Seiden - Program Director, LUXr NYC Case Study: SideReel - Zach Larson - Entrepreneur/Former CPO, SideReel

Experience maps have become more prominent over the past few years, largely because companies are realizing the interconnectedness of the cross-channel experience. It's becoming increasingly useful to gain insight in order to orchestrate service touchpoints over time and space. But I still see a dearth of quality references. When someone asks me for examples, the only good one I can reference is nForm's published nearly two years ago. However, I believe their importance exceeds their prevalence. I'm often asked what defines a good experience map. You could call an experience map a deliverable, although, as the current 4-letter word of UX, that may make some people gag a little bit. But really, it's a model. A model on steroids. It's an artifact that serves to illuminate the complete experience a person may have with a product or service. But it's not just about the illustration of the journey (that would simply be a journey map). And it's not a service blueprint which shows how a system works in enough detail to verify, implement and maintain it.

Eye tracking on Facebook Profile Page