Do you need real users in user studies, user experiments, and user surveys?

When you design user studies, user experiments, and user surveys (a.k.a. user research), there is a need to sample from the user population – that is selecting real users. Selecting real users is often considered vital for ensuring the validity, usefulness, and applicability of user research. But what are real users? Real users are participants … Read more

Using Eye-Tracking in User Studies: Unveiling Visual Attention Patterns

Eye tracking is critical in user studies because it provides valuable insights into users’ visual attention and behavior. It allows researchers to see where the users focus their attention while interacting with their digital interfaces, products, or content. The following are reasons why eye tracking is important in user studies: Unbiased Behavioral Data: Instead of … Read more

Why are User feedback and User testing important?

User feedback and user testing play a significant role in developing and improving digital products such as websites and mobile applications as it helps businesses understand their users. Understanding people, their characteristics, capabilities, commonalities, and differences allows designers to create more effective, safer, efficient, and enjoyable systems [2]. Here are some key points on what … Read more

The Impact of AI on UX Design

Artificial intelligence (AI) can potentially transform several industries, such as the UX industry Different AI applications have the potential to handle routine, creative, analytical, and strategic processes, such as writing a script or summarising an article. Specific AI applications, such as ChatGPT, have gained widespread popularity for their intelligence and seamless conversation capabilities. How organizations … Read more

User Study Capabilities at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI)

We conducted a user study this week, 22-26 January 2023, collecting eye, mouse, verbal, and survey data — all within a single system!  In case a user study is something that you or others within your organization might be interested in, reach out!  If there are research implications, we are open to collaboration. Reach out! … Read more

Fair compensation of crowdsourcing work: the problem of flat rates

Compensating crowdworkers for their research participation often entails paying a flat rate to all participants, regardless of the amount of time they spend on the task or skill level. If the actual time required varies considerably between workers, flat rates may yield unfair compensation. To study this matter, we analyzed three survey studies with varying … Read more

Who is in the sample? An analysis of real and surrogate users as participants in user study research in the information technology fields

This research aims to determine how often user studies reported in peer-reviewed information technology literature sample real users or surrogate users as participants. Constructing a sample of real users as participants in user studies is considered by most researchers to be vital for the validity, usefulness, and applicability of research findings. However, how often user … Read more

Generating Cultural Personas From Social Data: A Perspective of Middle Eastern Users

We conduct a mixed-method study to better understand the content consumption patterns of Middle Eastern social media users and to explore new ways to present online data by using automatic persona generation. First, we analyze millions of content interactions on YouTube to dynamically generate personas describing behavioral patterns of different demographic groups. Second, we analyze … Read more