Thursday, December 20, 2007

Statistical analysis for user experience practitioners

Welcome to uxstats - a blog for people interested in the application of statistical analysis techniques to user research & usability data.

The idea for this blog came about through a number of presentations, conversations & discussions with user experience practitioners decrying the lack of a resource focused on the analysis of data arising from the conduct of user research. The presentations I've given at oz-IA over the past two years have been well-received, although most people have asked for a more detailed coverage of the topics - something I've been unable to do in the context of a 45-min conference presentation.

Although a great deal of information is available from the mathematics & social science communities, the literature on the subject lacks a great deal with respect to its approachability for someone who deals in analysis work infrequently; and who may lack a lot of the theoretical background needed to make any sense of a standard statistical text.

Over time this blog will cover topics on the gathering and analysis of data arising from particular forms of user research. Rather than just covering a collection of analysis techniques, this series of articles will look at the research techniques themselves, and discuss the analysis of the data arising from them, with the aim that each article will form a self-contained set of techniques for a specific research task.

I'd welcome your input into the topics I'll be covering - the analysis techniques, the level of statistical theory, or the user research tasks themselves - as well as your feedback on the articles themselves.

I hope you find this series interesting, thought-provoking, and of practical application to your day-to-day work.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Cool. This will be good. Tell us all about cluster analysis ;)

Steve 'Doc' Baty said...

Donna, I would never live it down if I didn't tackle clustering techniques in a blog purporting to talk about statistics in user research. It's about 9th on the list of topics, though :)

Steve

Garumoo said...

Fantastic, looking forward to many more articles.

I'd like to see discussion of question format too, like the difference between "do you x? yes/no" and "how much x do you do? 0-100%". I'm leaning towards using the latter because I suspect I could do more statistics-wise than simple globbing Stuff like calculating correlations.

Or is there a way to calculate correlations with yes/no answers?