zakiwarfel.com

Todd, I have the utmost respect for you as a professional, but this survey seems to go against everything we stand for as UX professionals. Do you think that a survey that requires at least 156 individual clicks to get feedback on 6 prototyping method is well designed?

It’s a quick and dirty method. Surveymonkey doesn’t really allow for an ideal UX survey design. It’s serving the purpose—small time investment on my part to collect info to challenge and confirm some of my suspicions about the tools?

Ideal? No. Effective? Yes.

Ever tried Poll Daddy? Anyway, that kind of matrix isn’t the best way to get feedback for more than 3×3 items. The other issue with this kind of survey is that it hard to score from 1 to 3 on so many items.

I made a version of the same Matrix with exclusive choices. You would have one matrix for each product.

pro: remove some bias from the choice (user rates each method compared to itself)
con: need of multiple matrix.

Example for Paper :

http://www.polldaddy.com/s/B68AC0000FCA5F6F/

I second Luca. You say small time investment on your part, and that’s fine. But it’s a large time investment on our part which decreases the willingness to participate.

Since when does “but that’s the way the CMS/tool I chose to save time/money does it” constitute a valid excuse for poor usability? Good UX costs time and money. It’s what we tell our clients.

@Luca, what I wanted to avoid was creating a 6-7 page survey. The model you propose doesn’t allow participants to evaluate one model against the others. Additionally, since each item would be on it’s own page, trying to recall “I think Visio is about the same as Fireworks, but what did I rate Visio again?” is a problem.

Again, each model has it’s tradeoffs. I’ll agree it’s not ideal and if I had the time to create my own custom survey software I will. It’s on my list of things to do, but I have more important priorities right now, like getting this book out.

The time investment per participant is important, which is why I stated upfront that it would be about 5-7 minutes to complete. So, I am stating expectations upfront for predictability.

@Tom, while theoretically it would decrease the willingness to participate, 100% of participants who started the survey completed it.

I wonder why you have left out Flash from your list of prototyping tools? I realize any list is arbitrary, but this omission is odd given the penetration of this tool.

I find Flash to be the best tool for storyboarding. This is actually all I use it for currently, because as soon as I am ready to create an interactive prototype I move to CSS/HTML/Javascript.

The reason I find Flash so useful for storyboarding is that it is the only tool I’ve found that has both a timeline AND the concept of keyframing.

Without these two things together constructing a narrative, a sequence of frames in which arbitrary objects change state between frames, is extremely tedious.

Hey Tim, thanks for you question. I left Flash out for a couple of reasons. There’s really no shortage of books on Flash. I had to cut the list somewhere or else I’d never get the book out.

I’m a huge fan of Flash and think it’s a great prototyping tool. However, there’s no shortage of books on how to use Flash. I do plan to work Flash into the 2nd version of the book.