Articles by Carol Barnum
Dr. Barnum is co-founder of UX Firm, a UX research consulting company. She conducts research for clients in all sectors, using a variety of tools and techniques. She is the author of 6 books including Usability Testing Essentials: Ready, Set…Test! (2nd edition.)
How Professionals Moderate Usability Tests
Abstract This paper reports how 15 experienced usability professionals and one team of two graduate students moderated usability tests. The purpose of the study is to investigate the approaches to moderation used by experienced professionals. Based on this work, we present our analysis of some of the characteristics that distinguish good from poor moderation. In […] [Read More]
Invited Essay: The State of UX Research
Introduction I have been a UX researcher for 25 years. I did not come up through the usual degree programs available at the time, such as cognitive psychology and human factors. Rather, I came to the field from technical communication, seeing that there was a role for technical communicators to play in advocating for the […] [Read More]
Overlap, Influence, Intertwining: The Interplay of UX and Technical Communication
Note: In the first part of this essay, Ginny Redish extracts highlights from and builds on her recently-published commentary (Redish, 2010) about the intertwined history of technical communication and user experience. In the second part, Carol Barnum asks deep questions about roles that people with technical communication training have—and could have—within user experience (UX). Part […] [Read More]