Accessibility review: Expert assessment of a website is performed to ensure that it is in compliance with section 508 mandates for web accessibility by the disabled.
Competitive benchmarking: This method involves performing an End User Test on the same core tasks with your company's product and with those of 1-2 competitors.
End user test: Typically a 1-on-1 test in which qualitative impressions and quantitative data (time-on-task, success rates, visits to documentation, etc.) are collected as users interact with an interface or software application to complete a set of realistic tasks. Variations: can be conducted using early page sketches, screen-shots, or emerging prototypes; remote users in distant cities or countries can be tested over the Web.
Heuristic evaluation (expert review): A review of a product, interface, or software application by a team of usability and design experts; a best practices list of heuristic guidelines is used to uncover potential usability problems; Variations: can be augmented to include assessments of potential issues and conflicts that might be encountered as products are migrated cross-culturally.
Out-of-Box-Experience test: This methodology allows the end user to interact with a product from the first experience of opening the box all the way through set-up and core task performance. Measures such as time-on-task, success rates, and visits to documentation are collected as users interact with the product to complete a set of realistic tasks.
Task analysis: This method builds a thorough understanding of the key tasks customers or users are trying to accomplish with a product, including all the necessary steps, constraints, and proper sequencing of sub-tasks.
User profiling: This method builds a complete understanding of the target customers’ mental model, including their demographic and psychographic background, as well as their needs, goals, and values as they pertain to a specific product or software application.
Attribute Mapping: An attribute map gives development and management a clear understanding of how product features and/or design elements differentially create value in the mind of the customer. It allows the team to more easily prioritize resources towards those attributes most likely to wow, delight, or generate positive perceptions of quality and usefulness.
Branding/Messaging Signal Detection: Memory testing can determine which messages from branded information (i.e. advertising, packaging) leave the strongest impression in the participant's memory, and measure the overall subjective impression created by the branded information.
Conjoint Analysis: Participants make a series of pairwise choices between different attribute collections representing possible products. By manipulating the makeup of each collection, the independent value of each attribute and its value relative to all other attributes can be derived.
Contextual inquiry: Detailed field observations, interviews, and surveys are administered to understand how customers actually work or play with an existing product or software application.
Customer walkthroughs: Moderated group sessions with target customers to provide early feedback on emerging products, software, and interfaces. Variations: can be augmented to bring key members of the development team into a joint session.
Ethnography: Ethnography aims to understand customers’ use of a product or service within the course of their daily activities—whether at home, work, or in recreational settings. An ethnographic approach allows researchers to identify a variety of previously unknown (or under-appreciated) situational factors influencing customers’ use and perceptions of a product.
Hybrid Focus Groups: The principle purpose of hybrid focus groups is to obtain unbiased individually-collected data while offering the opportunity for group discussion. This method overcomes the pitfalls of traditional focus groups by employing a mixture of formal individual data collection measures and informal discussion.
Structured Qualitative Data Analysis: This is a useful technique when open-ended, free response measures are desirable to tap customers' unanticipated ideas or reactions to a product or concept. Using this method, open-ended responses can be minutely analyzed for patterns in participants' ideas or responses.
Design consultation: Expert advice from either an information sciences or design consultant to guide early product and interface development.
Design Profiling: This method provides detailed information about current and potential look-and-feels. Using this method, designs can be plotted on a number of key dimensions to determine each design's unique signature. This analysis will help determine which design best communicates the client's intended message.
Information architecture design: IA design is delivered as an abstracted representation of information connectivity and interaction that lays the foundation for the successful design and implementation of a website or software application.
Information Categorization: This research method will inform effective information architecture design and give an understanding of how a given user group categorizes large amounts of information.
User interface design: Information design, interaction design and visual design culminate in an elegant user interface based upon empirical data, established design principles and best practices.
