Combining usability metrics into a single score

I'm a former chemical engineer, software tester, programmer, and UX designer who is transitioning into quantitative UX research. I write here monthly. If you're new to Quant UXR, check out my article How to get started with Quantitative UX Research. If you're an expert, leave me a comment to let me know all the mistakes I've…

Stats in spreadsheets

I am reading the book Quantifying the User Experience by James Lewis and Jeff Sauro. Slowly. It is a BEAST. I'm also trying to recreate all the calculations in Google Sheets. I know, I know. There are templates and Excel companions available. I don't want that, though. I want to build the formulas by myself…

What’s wrong with my site?

In late-2015, my now-wife and I decided to move away from the city we'd lived our whole lives in. I applied for tons of development jobs in London before the move but hardly heard back from any of them. I figured it was because I had nothing to show online and was 7000km away. The…

Killing your darlings

Last month I wrote about my process of designing what I called vesting sparklines. I was super excited about them because they packed so much information into a small area and because they made so much sense to me. There is nothing like the moment when you suddenly come upon the answer to a design…

It’s okay to be slow

This post is #7 in a series of posts about my UX research about UX Maturity. For all other posts, see my UX Strategy page. Last week I wrote a long post summarizing my progress so far. At the end, I discussed some of my constraints, including the following: Do TWICE as much with HALF…

Duolingo is great, but…

I LOVE Duolingo. I can't recommend it enough for people who want to start learning a new language. Ever since I first tweeted about it back in 2015, I've been using it pretty much daily. First for a little bit of Spanish, and now for French and even a little bit of Vietnamese! https://twitter.com/sgryzko/status/566246417048829953 https://twitter.com/sgryzko/status/733747654992232449…

Quotes from Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal

I just finished reading Interviewing Users. It's one that has been on my list for a long time, probably because I loved Steve Portigal's Dollars to Donuts podcast. It did not disappoint. It was a great read for me because I've done enough user research to have some experience to map to, but not so…

The lorem ipsum bag

I’m currently on the trip of a lifetime. My fiancee Carolyn and I are exploring Southeast Asia with no return ticket and no real timeline other than “Be back in Canada by December”.

Carolyn and I wanted a lightweight way to share and remember our trip, so we are posting daily to ShaneAndCarolyn.wordpress.com using Post by Email.

The posts are mostly just fun pictures and anecdotes, but I recently posted one with a bit of a design spin, so I wanted to re-post it here on my tech blog.

So here it is! Feel free to check out the other posts as well.

Shane and Carolyn's Asian Adventure

Designers who are working on websites sometimes sketch out layouts and put what’s called fake placeholder text to show where the actual web content goes. This is sometimes known as Greeked Text. Here’s what I mean.

The idea is that if you put the buttons and icons and navigation in the right place, that your website will be great and you can worry about the content later. Some say that this is a bad thing– content is king so it should come first- but I think that it depends. Usually it’s not the end of the world.

That is, as long as you ACTUALLY CREATE CONTENT.

Today I was looking for a nice big backpack for me to use during my Asian travels then in the mountains when I get back to Canada. I found a great Jack Wolfskin 60L pack, but let’s just say that the price was…

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