April UX Meetup recap
Hey all –
Tonight’s UX Meetup was about usability, but was oh-so-much-more. We probably had a good 3 handfuls or so of local folks, many familiar faces (Garrick, Lori, Fred, Jon), many new faces (Karen, Kevin, Stephanie, Tommy, Scott and many others I didn’t get the chance to chat with!) Brit’s was a bit on the noisy side tonight, so we naturally grouped into smaller chat groups, which I liked because it allowed us all to have personal conversations with a number of folks. Anecdotal feedback indicated that tonight’s informal setup allowed for some powerful networking — cool!
Some highlights for me are:
1. being convinced to try Twitter (at least sometime)
2. being convinced to try Facebook and actually try and find some old friends out there
And, I was able to find a number of people eager to listen and comment on my acculturation to the consulting world…very helpful!
For next month, I may continue my quest to find yet a quieter spot…stay tuned, and I hope you can join us!
KO
P.S. I intended to pose a question to all regarding blended quant-qual usability methods (aka “unmoderated testing”), but didn’t even get around to it because of all the other great things we talked about tonight. If anybody cares to chime in with experience or opinion, I’m all ears!
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Kristi, thanks for setting this up, you too Garrick. I blogged about the meet-up, I had a great time.
http://kevinfarner.com/2008/04/02/mnteractive-my-first-meetup/
Kristi, on the quant/qual. There is a place for both in terms of usability, but unmoderated question doesn’t get you to the ‘why’ as easily as a moderated “please think out loud” usability study. The unmoderated obviously gives you volume, and there are some great tools on the web that give you volume on the cheap. AND you can see failure such as ‘90% of people didn’t click on the button to accomplish the task’. But, again, if that is all you do, you miss out on why the users didn’t click on the button, what were they trying to do.
And typically these tests are done at the tail-end of a project whereas we’ll do moderated usability at the paper prototype stage.
If I have veered wildly off of what you are talking about, let me know
You are spot on with what I’m talking about. I think quant has a place, distinct from and/or complementary to qual — e.g. benchmarking, creating goal-setting measures, hypoethsis-creation (to be later followed up by qual), etc. It’s a CHEAP way of getting a stastical sampling of users with some light qual (i.e. using open-ended fields).
And, like Ethnio, you can do intercepts of REAL shoppers in REAL contexts (as opposed to pre-recruits). I’m tending to prioritize realness over non-realness in terms of which methods in my kit of tools I prefer. Usability testing can be frustratingly unrealistic.
What are the inexpensive quant/qual tools you’ve seen out there? I’ve been demo-ing UserZoom, RelevantVue and am soon to test Keynote.
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[...] already beat me to the punch with her write-up on the evening but I’ll write mine up anyway, as a n00b’s perspective to this [...]