We are delighted to publish an editorial by Kurt Sillén on “Fast Tracking User Experience Maturity in Corporations—From a Business Perspective.” In this editorial the author shares his experiences in helping move large organizations up the UX maturity ladder. It is particularly insightful to hear his perspective from the business side. He discusses both activities such as the importance of observing how users are interacting with products in real-time, as well as creating attitude shifts with senior management on rewarding product failure and the risks of poor communication.
The first article is by Celeste Lyn Paul titled “Analyzing Card Sorting Data Using Graph Visualization.” In this article the author demonstrates how to analyze and visualize card sorting data using graph visualizations. These visualizations differ from more traditional visualizations in that they allow the researcher to clearly see the relationship between cards and clusters of cards. The author provides a case study that demonstrates how these visualizations are used and compared with a histogram matrix. This may have significant impacts for UX researchers by reducing the amount of time necessary to analyze card sorting data and by improving the quality of information architectures that come from the analysis.
The second article is by Alexandra Némery and Eric Brangier on a “Set of Guidelines for Persuasive Interfaces: Organization and Validation of the Criteria.” In this article the authors develop and validate a set of criteria to evaluate the persuasive characteristics of any interface. In their research they examine 164 publications from 1994 and 2011. Their research, along with 30 HCI experts, validated that there are eight separate criteria that can be used to evaluate persuasiveness: credibility, privacy, personalization, attractiveness, solicitation, priming, commitment, and ascendency. These criteria may be an extremely helpful way for UX researchers when examining the persuasiveness of any interface.
