Book Review - Measuring the User Experience
The more research I carry out, the more aware I am that I need a better way to capture the results, so Measuring the User Experience by Tom Tullis and Bill Albert looked like a helpful read.
As someone who finds maths really hard I was a little bit daunted when I flicked through it and found it full of tables and formulae, however once I started reading it all came together.
Do not get me wrong this was a hard slog and there are still bits that I will need to re-read to understand fully. But it gave me a really good overview of all the measurements that I could be recording during testing which will make it much easier to speak to my stakeholders about what we found out.
And it seems there are quite a lot of things you can measure, for instance time on task and failure rates and quite a lot that had never occured to me! Things like testing for learnability, lostness and emotional research, something I had not come across before.
To test for emotional feedback means testing the user while using eye tracking equipment, EEG, heart rate monitors or skin conductance equipment to get a more accurate result of emotions than users self reported result. (I was quite shocked to read about this for the first time at lunch time only to attend an event that evening to hear Prof Karen Cham speak about it too!)
To be honest I think this could have been a shorter read, but it does make it a very thorough book on the subject.
If you are doing user research you should probably read this book. And although it is tempting to skip bits I would suggest it needs a proper read that first time as they covered a bunch of methods I had never come across before.
This is the sort of book that is now full of post-it notes and will sit on my desk for reference, as every test is different and so all will need different types of measurement.