ModCloth_UXR

You may be thinking, oh no, not another Pinfographic! This week's infographic takes a look at why both etailers and content marketers should take this exploding social network seriously. I've said it before, I'll say it once more - Pinterest is a social network not about what people are doing, but about the things that people want to consume. And it already refers more traffic than Twitter. The network is growing beyond the Midwest. Though still predominantly female, the entrance of well-known brands are drawing more and more XY chromosomes. So who are you talking to and how should you plant your flag? Maxymizer's pinfographic has some great pinformation.

Andy Weissman, a partner at Union Square Ventures, laid out his firm's investment thesis this morning. USV has invested in grand slams like Zynga and Twitter. It is also an investor in Tumblr, Etsy and Foursquare. Weissman's colleague Brad Burnham tweeted the essence of the firm: "Large networks of engaged users, differentiated through user experience, and defensible through network effects."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Create your own word cloud from any text to visualize word frequency. Doesn't customize color/font like others, but groups similar words and can include count of words.

When I recently browsed my Foursquare contacts - admittedly to remove some dead weight because I was getting too close to the 1,000 friend limit - I saw that a number of friends had stopped using it. I wanted to know why, and several were kind enough to share their stories.

Practical tips and tricks to better survey design

Originally published: May 11, 2004 Back in the late 1970's, the US government commissioned a study to look at effective group decision making. In the study, they asked 30 military experts to study intelligence data and try to construct the enemy's troop movements. Each expert analyzed the data and compiled a report.

Diary Study Program

Like Amway, you sell chloe + isabel jewelry & earn 30% commission. It's kinda social b/c you have an online boutique.

Originally shared by Beth @ July 12, 2011

We know there are a lot of psychological factors that influence purchase behavior online and offline. Here are just a handful of funny things that influence customers to behave the way they do

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.

Screen sharing tool

Screen sharing tool

Usability and user experience testing is vital to creating a successful website, and only more so if it's an e-commerce website, a complex app or another website for which there's a definite ROI. And running your own user tests to find out how users are interacting with your website and where problems might arise is completely possible.

Why did you click on this blog post? Right now, you're probably able to answer that question with relative ease. Micro-surveys are short and to the point. Similar to the question above, they only have one or two questions and they're extremely targeted. This means that they're not only easy to answer, but easy to create, implement, and analyze. If your company is practicing agile, or just trying to move quickly, you can easily integrate micro-surveys into your existing schedule.