Ethical user research isn’t only the right thing to do but it makes good business sense. Principles of ethical conduct guide our decision-making, keeping us out of trouble and holding us accountable to our users and society. Through a simple step-by-step approach, you can build an ethical practice within your organization that will ensure you’re respecting the dignity and welfare of your research participants. In this article, we will discuss ethics and ethical principles as the ruling standards to guide our user research.
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Research is an essential part of creating good UX. We are often in roles where we interact with our users in order to collect data to inform our UX. We need to ensure our UX research is compliant with ethical standards of research conducted with humans. To do this, we need to have an awareness of potential ethical issues in research, training on how to conduct ethical research, and a systematic review of our research protocols to avoid potential ethical pitfalls.
In this article, Victor Yocco discusses some areas of ethical consideration for UX practitioners when conducting UX research, and explores potential solutions to preventing research from venturing into unethical territory.
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Right questions don’t simply roll off the tongue, but it’s a handy skill everyone can train. The following pieces of advice will help you to formulate questions that foster reliable answers from your users and clients. Slava Shestopalov will talk about 12 kinds of questions explained with examples. The first part includes six frequent mistakes and how to fix them. The second part presents six ways to improve decent questions and take control of difficult situations.
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User research helps companies make higher quality software faster and more cost-effectively. However, there can sometimes be resistance to the up-front costs of running UX studies. In this article, Steve Bromley will equip you with some of the tools you will need to run the right kind of research study. This helps a research team run high quality, reliable studies that have a real impact on design and product decisions.
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If you haven’t already researched biometrics for your user testing projects, perhaps it’s something you’d like to check out as an addition to your current testing. Today, Susan Weinschenk brings you some new tools that are easy and inexpensive to use. Others may take more investment of your time and budget. Or you may want to bring in an outside firm that specializes in these tools. (Some suggestions for outside vendors are at the end of the article.)
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It’s important to understand that all decisions involve emotions. In this article, Susan Weinschenk explains how you can make your users feel confident of their decisions and why it’s a bad idea to provide more than four options to choose from. For example, if someone is making a habit-based decision, do not give them a lot of information, and always limit the number of choices people have to make to one, two or three. If you provide too many choices then people likely won’t choose at all.
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Building websites is hard. Being user-focussed, having a progressive enhancement mindset, and thinking things through from the beginning can have a real impact on both the speed and quality of delivery. In this article, Shane Hudson is going to explore building a text box, in an exaggeration of situations many of us often find ourselves in. Hopefully, by the end of this article, you can all feel more emphatic to how the journey from start to finish is rarely linear.
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The 2017 holiday season proved — once again — that e-commerce has become a major part of consumers’ shopping habits. This guide will take a closer look at the role mobile websites played in sales from that time period and how to use that data to prepare your website for the 2018 holiday season. Suzanne Scacca is going to give you a quick rundown of what happened during the 2017 holiday sales season and, in particular, what role mobile played in it.
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In order for a product to succeed, designers should know their competition and collect as much data as possible. This data helps to create a solid product that users will actually want to use, rather than a product we want or imagine. Competitive analysis is one of the ways to get this data and to create a user-friendly product. No prior knowledge of the topic is needed because in this article, Mayur Kshirsagar will be explaining what the term means and how to perform a competitive analysis as you go.
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Onboarding is a real challenge as it can be complex, involving the user entering personal information. In this three-part series, Joe Leech outlines the three phases of the product lifecycle, the future for UX, and the skills and approach you’ll need to design modern digital products. Let’s take a closer look at how we can help users to sign up, onboard, and pay for your product.
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