Column: Discovery

Young children communicate well visually. When they want to articulate something for which they simply don’t have words, they point to objects in their environment. When they want more food and their plate is empty, they point to their empty plate or slam their plate down onto the table to signal hunger. They are prompting their parents to visualize what they are asking for. Their parents see the empty plate and know they’ve just finished eating their food. Their child must be asking for more food.

Visuals are effective ways in which to communicate. Sometimes sketching is the fastest way to convey a need or ask a question. According to education professor John Hattie and cognitive psychologist Gregory Yates, people are not all just better visual learners or auditory learners. Lab studies show that people learn best when the stimuli they receive are from different types of media. Our brains are wired to integrate information in different modalities. When we want people to understand something that we are explaining to them, we can reinforce our meaning not just through words, but also through pictures and sounds. Read More

At some point in our childhood, we constructed things—whether it was a house out of logs or a hat out of origami paper. We have all figured out a way to build stuff, solving problems through play and by trying things out. Sometimes they work. In other cases, they don’t. Often, even when they don’t, we still take away something of value from the experience—be it a lesson on what to do or what not to do.

Researchers working in the instructional-learning field refer to the concept of understanding through play as tinkering. While this might sound somewhat childish—and it sort of is—tinkering has its time and place in fields such as engineering, design, and science, whose focus is the development and refinement of new ideas. Read More

In this first installment of my series “Rows and Columns,” I’ll describe how to use some very powerful tools of spreadsheets that can make analyzing your UX research data much easier. For those who have been reluctant to use spreadsheets during analysis, this series is for you, and you’ll hopefully find this information useful. For those of you who have expertise in using spreadsheets, some of this information might be review.

The central part of any UX research project is the analysis of data. This task can be both satisfying and cumbersome at the same time. As you go through your data, you might become excited as you recognize emerging patterns or see great variations across participants. However, getting to the point at which you can easily see such trends can be quite difficult. Your data must be in a format that affords easy filtering, so you can decipher the various rows and columns across participants.

Part 1 of this series covers the following features of spreadsheets, which can facilitate your understanding of the data you’ve gathered:

• filters
• form elements such as checkboxes and drop-down lists Read More