Usability research

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Notes: friction diagram

Some techniques used in usability research

  • Friction diagram Plot of activity against time that highlights deviations from the primary activity.

  • Likert scale is a questionnaire entry that asks you to respond on a symmetric scale of subjective responses along the lines of “strongly disagree” through to “strongly agree”.

  • Snowball sampling is finding participants by starting with a small seed of participants and using them to find some more participants. Keep going until you have enough. Typically used with hidden populations such as drug addicts.

  • Open coding is deciding which features of an interview (say) are significant based on sampling a few interviews. Then using the resulting set of codes for the remainder. (But the Wikipedia link says something a little different.)