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Individualized Recommendations: Users’ Expectations & Assumptions
Summary: Users appreciate personalized content suggestions and are willing to give up some of their privacy for quality recommendations, while accepting some inaccurate recommendations.
20 years ago, Jakob Nielsen posited that personalization was overrated , primarily because technology was not sufficiently advanced to create good predictions for what users cared about. Fast forward to today, and (as he predicted) personalization is a growing trend on the web. Individualized personalization , as opposed to role-based personalization , refers to the practice of tailoring content and functionality to a specific user, based on data gathered about that user’s preferences and behaviors.
While personalized user interfaces can include anything from command shortcuts to color schemes, a particularly useful form of individualized personalization is the use of recommendations on websites and mobile apps. Recommended products or content items are particularly common on ecommerce sites, social ..
Change Blindness in UX: Definition
Summary: Significant changes in a web page can remain unnoticed when they lack strong cues, due to the limitations of human attention.
In usability testing, we often observe users who overlook a change on the screen that the designers thought would be obvious and highly noticeable. As always in usability, if you worked on a design, then you know what to look for, where to look for it, when it will appear, and what it means . So yes, it’s obvious to you and you wouldn’t miss the appearance of an important message or data object when you review your own design. But users often do. Why? Because of change blindness, which is a million-year old fact of human (and protohuman) perception, and not likely to go away any time soon.
So what is change blindness? In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho , one of the most famous movies of all time, detective Arbogast looks at Norman Bates’ house projected on a dark cloudless sky. The camera moves back to the detective’s face, and follows him as he starts wal..
Collaborative Agile Activities Reduce Silos and Align Perspectives
Summary: All members of an Agile team, regardless of design skills, can contribute to the design of a product or feature during the development process.
If you're working in an Agile environment, you already know that it's not easy for UX and there is a lot to get done in a short amount of time. Sometimes, you may be lucky enough to have multiple UX professionals on your team, but other times you're flying solo . If you find yourself dreading your UX to-do list, consider bringing other members of your development team into your design process . Doing so not only will lighten your workload, but it will also introduce multiple perspectives and ease further collaboration processes (for example, if you need signoff from other departments).
In this article, I discuss three go-to collaborative activities I like to use with Agile teams to brainstorm design ideas: 6-up 1-up, whiteboard session, and telephone. These activities foster ideation , collaboration, and involvement w..
The Paradox of Intelligent Assistants: Poor Usability, High Adoption
Summary: Frequent users of Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant report attempting low-complexity tasks such as simple fact retrievals, weather forecast, navigation, playing music, setting timers.
When we recently tested the usability of intelligent assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, we found that interactions with these agents are plagued with problems, ranging from poor comprehension of commands to inherent limitations in verbal output.
Yet despite these problems, voice-based assistants are becoming increasingly popular. 46% of U.S. adults reported using voice-controlled digital assistants in 2017, according to the Pew Research Center. And when we recently asked 211 daily users of an intelligent assistant to recall the last time when they interacted with an assistant, most described successful experiences, and many positively gushed with enthusiasm about how great their assistant was:
“I speak to Google Assistant on a regular basis, I use it every day, all day. And I ..