Introduction to Volume 16, Issue 3

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Our May 2021, invited essay is “The Best of Times for UX Research, the Worst of Times for Usability Research?” by Jason Buhle.  He describes how the landscape of usability and UX research has been changing and provides recommendations for increasing the academic and professional standing of usability research. 

In addition to the essay, this issue includes three methodological research papers: one on persona development, one on a guideline-based inspection method, and one summarizing the standardized usability questionnaires currently available to UX researchers and practitioners.

The first article is “Creating Personas from Design Ethnography and Grounded Theory,” by P. J. White and Frank Devitt.  They describe a method and associated case study for persona creation in three phases: Post fieldwork data management, Coding and grounded theory, and Data reduction and data display.

The second article is “GCS: A Quick and Dirty Guideline Compliance Scale,” by Lukas Lamm and Christian Wolff.  They investigated the development of compliance scales for a guideline-based inspection method, comparing problem discovery and experiential ratings between guideline reviews and conventional usability testing in an automotive case study.

In the third article, “A Review of Post-Study and Post-Task Subjective Questionnaires to Guide Assessment of System Usability,” Andrew Hodrien and Terrence Fernando summarize the standard usability questionnaires that are available for use, using this information to guide selection of which are the best to use in different research contexts. 

Published in: in Volume 16, Issue 3,

The Authors

  • Photo of Bill AbertBill Albert

    Dr. Albert is Senior Vice President and Global Head of User Experience at Mach49, a growth incubator for global businesses. Prior to joining Mach49, Bill was Executive Director of the User Experience Center and Adjunct Professor in Human Factors in Information Design at Bentley University. He has presented his work in user experience at more than 50 national and international conferences, and has published his research in the areas of eye tracking, data visualization, service design, and information design. He co-wrote (with Tom Tullis) the first book on UX metrics, Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting UX Metrics (third edition published in 2022). He also co-wrote (with Tom Tullis and Donna Tedesco) Beyond the Usability Lab: Conducting Large-Scale Online User Experience Studies in 2010. He received his PhD from Boston University. He completed a post-doc at Nissan Cambridge Basic Research focusing on cognitive demands in the use of navigation systems.

  • James R. (Jim) Lewis, Ph.D

    Dr. Lewis is a Distinguished User Experience Researcher at MeasuringU. He has published influential papers on the assessment of perceived usability and sample size estimation for usability studies and has product experience in the design and evaluation of user interfaces (graphical, spoken, mobile), including having been the lead interaction designer for the product widely regarded as the first smart phone, the Simon. He is on over 90 US patents and has over 100 publications. His five books include Practical Speech User Interface Design and, with Jeff Sauro, Quantifying the User Experience and Surveying the User Experience. In 2021 he was inducted into the Academy of Medicine, Engineering, and Science of Florida.