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Column: User Dialogues

UXmatters has published 9 editions of the column User Dialogues.

Top 3 Trending User Dialogues Columns

  1. Conducting Successful Interviews with Project Stakeholders

    User Dialogues

    Creating exceptional user experiences through research

    A column by Steve Baty
    September 10, 2007

    If you’ve read some of my previous columns on UXmatters, you could be forgiven for thinking my entire working life is spent largely surrounded in a sea of quantitative data. This is, rather surprisingly even to me, not nearly close to the truth. Looking back over recent months, by far the most common form of research I’ve carried out is that stalwart of qualitative studies—the interview.

    A simple, semi-structured, one-on-one interview can provide a very rich source of insights. Interviews work very well for gaining insights from both internal and external stakeholders, as well as from actual users of a system under consideration. Though, in this column, I’ll focus on stakeholder interviews rather than user interviews. (And I’ll come back to that word, insights, a little later on, because it’s important.) Read More

  2. User Research Doesn’t Prove Anything

    User Dialogues

    Creating exceptional user experiences through research

    A column by Steve Baty
    March 20, 2007

    Recently, I was reading through a sample chapter of a soon-to-be-published book. The book and author shall remain nameless, as shall the book’s topic. However, I was disappointed to read, in what otherwise appeared at first glance to be an interesting publication, a very general, sweeping statement to the effect that qualitative research doesn’t prove anything and, if you want proof, you should perform quantitative research. The author’s basic assumption was that qualitative research can’t prove anything, as it is based on small sample sizes, but quantitative research, using large sample sizes, does provide proof.

    This may come as a shock to everyone, but quantitative research does not provide proof of anything either.

    Here, I’m using the word proof in the mathematical sense, because that is the context within which the author made those statements. In mathematics, a proof is a demonstration that, given certain axioms, some statement of interest is necessarily true. The important distinction here is the use of the word necessarily. In user research, as with all avenues of statistical inquiry, we’re able to demonstrate only that a hypothesis is probably true—or untrue—with some specific degree of certainty.

    Granted, I’m being pedantic; and you might think this just an interesting exercise in semantics. But let me take you through a brief survey of this topic, then perhaps you’ll appreciate the importance of this distinction. Read More

  3. Patterns in UX Research

    User Dialogues

    Creating exceptional user experiences through research

    A column by Steve Baty
    February 23, 2009

    One of the key objectives of user research is to identify themes or threads that are common across participants. These patterns help us to turn our data into insights about the underlying forces at work, influencing user behavior.

    Patterns demonstrate a recurring theme, with data or objects appearing in a predictable manner. Seeing a visual representation of the data is usually enough for us to recognize a pattern. However, it is much harder to see patterns in raw data, so identifying patterns can be a daunting task when we face large volumes of research data. Patterns stand out above the typical noise we’re used to seeing in nature or in raw data. Read More

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