Publication digital libraries for UX researchers (research database)

Publication libraries are great source of existing research conducted by researchers across different domains, geographies and markets.

1. IEEE Xplore Digital Library

IEEE Xplore Digital Library is content rich platform which has more than 5 Million published documents.

-       Search over 5 million publications

-       200K+ artificial intelligence publications

-       41K+ IoT related publications

-       Top conferences across the globe in a calendar year

Link: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/home.jsp 

2. ACM Digital library (ACM SIGCHI)

The ACM Digital Library is a research, discovery and networking platform containing:

-       The Full-Text Collection of all ACM publications, including journals, conference proceedings, technical magazines, newsletters and books.

-       A collection of curated and hosted full-text publications from select publishers.

-       The ACM Guide to Computing Literature, a comprehensive bibliographic database focused exclusively on the field of computing.

-       A richly interlinked set of connections among authors, works, institutions, and specialized communities.

Link: https://dl.acm.org/ 

3. Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)

Springer distinguished conference proceedings series publishes the latest research developments in all areas of computer science.

Find helpful resources, support and advice on how to publish in LNCS, including open access options. You can search and explore LNCS content - with more than 10,000 (e)Books published to date - by year, forthcoming proceedings, LNCS state-of-art surveys, tutorials, topical sublibraries, and more.

Annually 600+ volumes | 20,000+ papers | 45,000+ authors published

Link: https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs 

4. Statista

Statista is a German online portal for statistics, which makes data collected by market and opinion research institutes and data derived from the economic sector and official statistics available in English, French, German and Spanish. It is one of the most successful statistics databases in the world[1] According to the company, its platform contains more than 1,000,000 statistics on more than 80,000 topics from more than 22,500 sources.

Link: https://www.statista.com/ 

 

5. Research Gate

ResearchGate is the professional network for scientists and researchers. Over 15 million members from all over the world use it to share, discover, and discuss research. We're guided by our mission to connect the world of science and make research open to all.

Link: https://www.researchgate.net/ 

6. Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.

Link: https://scholar.google.com/ 

Tips for conducting CI

Contextual Inquiry - CI

Contextual inquiry (CI) is a user-centered design (UCD) research method.

The Usability Professionals’ Association’s Usability Body of Knowledge, defines a contextual inquiry as follows: “A semi-structured interview method to obtain information about the context of use, where users are first asked a set of standard questions and then observed and questioned while they work in their own environments.”

When and why it is used?

Beginning of the design process or Early in research phase in UCD process.

Tips for conducting CI

Introduce yourself and objective of study 

The researcher introduces him or herself and shares their design focus. They may request permission to record and start recording. They promise confidentiality to the user. Along with these, researcher also briefs about this activity and expectations from participants.

Create questionnaire

Try to focus on open ended question, Frame your questions in such a way that participants will answer in story telling manner. It is observed that when participants narrate their experience they tend to give more valuable and qualitative information.

Ask about their latest experience 

Last experience of using any product or service etc. in context to CI is the source of providing amazing insights. Probability of remembering latest experience and recall information for answer is always high. Participants can tell you their real and immediate pain.

Observe observe and observe 

The most important work while CI is observing each and every activity participant is doing, he is saying, he is referring, because all these observations actually leads to qualitative insights.

Work as team 

It becomes difficult while interview to take notes, so always try to perform this activity in a group.

Take notes 

After completing CI don’t forget to take notes immediately because after activity memories are fresh and you will be able to note granular information.

Record 

It would be really better if Audio or video recording is available, by which you can record word to word interview along with emotions. But don't forget to take consent from participants before recording.

Demographic details 

Don't forget to gather their demographic details like, their experience, age, gender, education level, usage of smart phone, usage of internet, frequency of use etc.

Preferences 

Ask about their preferences also like their favorite similar app or platform etc. it gives you some insights to understand participant’s usage behavior.

Author: 

Abhishek Jain

Useful Research about Usability Testing

Question 1: How many users per user group for Usability Testing?

Answer: There are some researches for Sample Size –

1. Five users will uncover approximately 80% of the usability problems in a product (Virzi, 1992 and Nielsen 1993).

2. Spool and Schroeder (2001) report that testing five users revealed only 35% of the problems.

3. Faulkner (2003) found that:

Testing five users revealed an average of 85% of usability problems, but percentage ranged from nearly 100% down to only 55%.

10 participants help ensure that 80% of usability problems will be found.

Question 2: Should usability test participants ‘think Aloud’ or should they report their experience after the task is completed?

Answer: Retrospective vs. Concurrent think aloud protocols – Testing the usability of an online library catalogue. Van Den Haak, M.L., 2003.

“Both Technique reveal comparable sets of Usability Problems. Participants worked more slowly when thinking aloud, suggesting that when task time is an issue, alternatives such as retrospective reposts should be used.”

Questions 3: How does having a facilitator present affect usability test performance?

Answer: Information search in the laboratory and on the web: with and without experimenter – schtle – Mecklenbeck, M., & Huber, O. 2003.

“Users spend about twice as long and clicked three times as many links when facilitator is present. Facilitated testing environments may result in artificially diligent attempts at completing a task relative to non-facilitated tests.”

Question 4: Which is the best method for testing mobile application: Laboratory or field testing

Answer: Usability Testing of Mobile Applications: A Comparison between Laboratory and Field Testing. Anne Kaikkonen, Aki Kekalainen, Mihael Cankar, Titti Kallio, and Anu Kankainen. 2005.

“When testing a user interface of a mobile app, field testing may not necessarily be the best place; mostly because it is more time consuming than the lab test.

Testing in the field requires double the time in comparison to the laboratory. In the field you can run half of the tests per day you run in the laboratory.

In a field test, running a pre-test or a pilot is critical: there are so many details that can go wrong, and you really need to check that everything is working correctly.”

6 most often used User Research techniques

I find it amazing how often very similar problems require notably different approaches in order to be solved successfully. So far I’ve found this holds true for just about anything in life and, by extension, usability research as well.

Usability research is all about observing and understanding user behaviors, needs and methodologies. Mike Kuniaysky says that it is “the process of understanding the impact of design on an audience.”

It follows that Usability specialists are problem solvers with many tools (research techniques) at their disposal. I bring you a breakdown of some of the most commonly used user research approaches;

Usability Testing

Usability Testing is a research technique which helps us evaluate a product or service by testing it on its representative users. In order to eliminate outside disturbances and allow the researcher to better take notes of the entire process, it is preferably done in a controlled environment such as a lab, but can also be done remotely or in a room where we can ensure no disturbances or distractions. Often it is filmed or videotaped, but doing so is not a requirement as long as someone is closely observing the user and taking notes.

The goal of Usability Testing is to identify any usability problems, collect qualitative and quantitative data and to determine the participants’ satisfaction level with the product or service we are testing.

In order to achieve that, we measure various factors such as time needed to perform tasks, error and success rates, preference for alternative solutions and, of course, users’ subjective level of satisfaction.

A/B Testing

Sometimes also called “multivariate testing,” “live testing,” or “bucket testing”, it is perhaps the most straightforward form of testing.
A/B Testing is merely comparing effectiveness of two different versions of the same design or product by launching them both under similar circumstances.

In context of web pages, A/B Testing would mean launching two different versions of the same web site at the same time. The goal here is to see which version of the web page (A or B, with A being the control version and B being the variation) ends up giving us a higher conversion rate.

Quantitative Survey

A Quantitative Survey is a survey or a questionnaire distributed to a large number of participants; usually a representative sample of our target market, in order to hear their opinions strictly on a subject we are testing and need input on.

It is important that the questions in this type of a survey are closed, meaning that the respondents are choosing from specific selection of answers and are not given an opportunity to expand or elaborate on their responses.

Web Analytics

Used as tools for business and market research, Web Analytics help us assess and improve the effectiveness of a website. Web Analytics are done by collecting, measuring, analyzing and reporting on various web data obtained by web servers, tracking cookies and so on.

By obtaining data from a large number of users we can highlight patterns in navigation and user types as well as focus on answering specific questions such as “How many people visited the site?”, “How many of these visits were unique visitors?”, “How did they come to the site?”, “How long did they stay and how much time did they spend on each particular part of our site?”, “Which keywords did they use in their search which brought them to the site?”, “What keywords did they search with on the sites’ search engine?”, “How does the day of the week or a time of a day affect user habits?” and many, many more.

When performing web analytics we use various software to collect a large amount of data, but it is up to a Usability Specialist to interpret the data and come to concrete conclusions and ideas on how to utilize the data we’ve collected in order to improve the UX.

Focus Groups

Using a Focus Group, a Usability Specialist will lead a moderated discussion with 4 to 12 participants. This discussion will be lead in a controlled environment- just like a Usability Testing session.

The goal of a Focus Group is to gain verbal and written feedback through discussion and exercises and to explore preferences (and reasons for those preferences) among different solutions.

Although Focus Groups are definitely a powerful tool when it comes to system development they are never used as an only source of usability data.

This is because the feedback we receive from Focus Groups is subjective, and therefore should be taken with a grain of salt- especially in cases where the users are asked to describe how they perform activities which span many days or weeks.

Hence, we do not use Focus Groups to assess interaction styles or design usability, but to discover what the users want from the system they are using.

Sometimes what we, the developers, want to give the users isn’t what the users actually need from our websites and apps and this is why Focus Groups are a valuable source of information; they help us align our views with the views and needs of our average user.

Central Location Test

A Central Location Test (or interview) employs both quantitative and qualitative research techniques, as well as visual techniques such as monitoring the respondents’ eye movements and testing for degree of recall of particular elements of a website, app or a product.

In a controlled environment, groups of 15 to 50 people are shown demos or allowed to use products before being interviewed or taking a survey to measure their grasp of the concept, the appeal of various features and the desirability of the product.

CLT is the most suitable method for testing concepts, new or modified products or packaging, advertising effectiveness and sensory research.

References : View Original link to article

About Author:

Ines Anić (@i_anic) is a Content and Administrative Associate at UX Passion, where she writes about UX, UI, design and social media management. She is passionate about UX, Usability, design and video games; and curious about technology, gadgets, IT and the world of startups. Ines is looking forward to connecting with you on LinkedIn and Twitter!