Articles by Alex Genov

Alex is responsible for customer research and usability of TurboTax's products and services. He received his PhD in Experimental Social Psychology from Clark University. Areas of research: emotions, individual differences, non-verbal emotion measures, and usability. During his academic career, Dr. Genov developed and taught courses in Research Methods, Statistics, and Psychology.

Usability Testing with Real Data

Abstract Usability practitioners run the risk of misreading the results of usability evaluations, either identifying false positives when artificial user data interferes with a user’s product experience or overlooking real problems when they use artificial user data. In this paper, we examine a strategy for incorporating users’ real data in usability evaluations. We consider the […] [Read More]

Iterative Usability Testing as Continuous Feedback: A Control Systems Perspective

Abstract This paper argues that in the field of usability, debates about number of users, the use of statistics, etc. in the abstract are pointless and even counter-productive. We propose that the answers depend on the research questions and business objectives of each project and thus cannot be discussed in absolute terms. Sometimes usability testing […] [Read More]