Situated Research's Blog

How has business been this year? Are you aware of how the various sectors of your organization did this year, and would you like for them to do better next year? If so, then it is time to perform a year-end business review. Read more »

Last week, I made a slide for the new User Experience (UX) Basic Training course with the recommended number of test users for different types of studies. I like teaching foundational courses because they afford me just this kind of opportunity — to distill 25 years of usability process research into a single table. Patterns crystallize when complex topics are condensed to the essence. Read more »

Companies engaging in B2B marketing and sales are starting to recognize that the way people buy has changed dramatically over the years, with the continued development of Internet search and the emergence of B2B social media. What many of these companies haven’t yet realized, however, is that they may need to respond by changing the way they sell.

The maxim that “people buy from people” remains true, but how the selling is done needs to change rapidly. Continuous face-to-face selling can become very expensive where the buying cycle has changed dramatically from how it has been in the past. Unnecessary travel to prospects who are not ready to buy will have a huge impact on your sales effectiveness. Read more »

Some people think that usability is very costly and complex and that user tests should be reserved for the rare web design project with a huge budget and a lavish time schedule. Not true. Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.

In earlier research, Tom Landauer and I showed that the number of usability problems found in a usability test with n users is:

N(1-(1-L)ⁿ)

where N is the total number of usability problems in the design and L is the proportion of usability problems discovered while testing a single user. The typical value of L is 31%, averaged across a large number of projects we studied. Plotting the curve for L=31% gives the following result:

The most striking truth of the curve is that zero users give zero insights. Read more »

Blogging can be intimidating for someone who hasn’t done it in the past or grown up in the age where everyone has a personal blog. It is, however, critical that business owners and marketers “blog for business.” Putting pen to paper or more appropriately, putting fingers to your keyboard is the biggest challenge for most people. So let’s talk about how to get started. Read more »

Greetings! Today we’re happy to offer a guest post by Ross Smith, Director of Test, Windows Security, at Microsoft, and one of the authors of The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention (Microsoft Press, 2007).

Ross here. This month celebrates the 50th anniversary of the publication of the Harry M. Markowitz’s classic book, Portfolio Selection. In this ground-breaking publication, for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1990, Markowitz talks of the benefits of diversification and the mathematics behind risk-reward strategies.

Modern portfolio theory (MPT), based on Markowitz’s work, suggests that the return of an investment portfolio is maximized for any given level of risk by using asset classes with low correlations to one other. In other words, a diverse set of investments reduces risk and maximizes return. In a portfolio with two diverse assets, when the value of asset #1 is falling, asset #2 is rising at the same rate. MPT also assumes an efficient market—that is, all known information is reflected in the price of an investment. These factors contribute to an investor’s ability to create an “optimal portfolio” for his level of risk. Read more »

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Posted By: Situated Research, LLC

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