We’ve just released some updates to Chalkmark’s heatmaps: You can now optionally choose to view your image in greyscale with the heatmap overlaid. This can be very helpful if your screenshot or mockup is particularly colourful causing the heatmap to get a little lost. Individual dots on the heatmap are no longer elliptical, but instead they are now circular as they should be! The colours are much hotter than they were previously. Significantly less application of lavender. Your heatmaps are now available… Read More »

Two days ago I presented this poster to the crowd at the IA Summit 2011 in Denver, Colorado for the Poster Session. We’re trying to address two issues with Card Sort Analysis and this poster is a discussion piece for a proposed new algorithm for analysis. The two issues: Current methods for Card Sort Analysis are essentially qualitative. Although this is very useful, there are times when it is desirable to use a larger data set. Quantitative Card Sort Analysis… Read More »

Yesterday we posted a Getting Started with Tree Testing webinar and today we have part 2: Advanced Tree Testing. Enjoy! WHO’S DAVE? Dave O’Brien designed the first version of Treejack to make it easy to run tree tests online. He’s a senior consultant at Optimal Usability, New Zealand’s leading usability company, and has been deep into usability and design for 15 years.

Last week we ran a great webinar on Tree Testing with Dave O’Brien. Although we had a hiccup whereby we *forgot* to press the teenie tiny Start Recording button until about half way through, Dave has kindly offered to redo the webinar for us. What a guy. The bonus is that this time he’s been even more thorough and taken all the questions raised during the live webinar into consideration on the way. So here it is! Part 2 will be… Read More »

This article was first published on the Global User Research blog. Card sorting is an effective technique for teasing out the important distinctions in our content inventory. Conducting card sorts is also a great way to gather insights about the nature of the content and your users’ mental models. I like to think of it as an opportunity to ‘load up your brain’ with the information you’ll need to design a well-informed IA. Sam Ng has called it ‘eye-balling’ the… Read More »