The User Research Round-up - CW5

Task time, AI, and strategy!

👋 Hey, Nikki here! Welcome to this 🔒subscriber-only 🔒 User Research Round-Up with the world’s most creative, helpful, new, and informative user research-based articles, podcasts, events, books, and academic resources sent straight to your inbox. 

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Why, hello there! Thank you for opening this and reading it; I appreciate it very much 😁 I hope you are having a good week and are excited for the upcoming weekend. It’s been pretty okay weather-wise here in terms of winter. I played some tennis outside last weekend, and although I couldn’t feel my hands, it was super fun to be back around all my tennis buddies.

You almost can’t tell how cold I am in that photo, huh? 😂 There is a ball up there somewhere, I promise.

Anyway, I’ve spent a lot of time on the interwebs this past week, and while I think I spent a bit too much time, I’ve found some great resources that I believe could be of huge value to you! So, let’s get on to the round-up!

PS. I still have one more spot open for mentorship for Spring/Summer - check out how I can help you up-level and feel wildly confident in your career!

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01.

Can longer task times for users be a good thing? (Article) by Carl Pearson, PhD

We tend to think of task times in quantitative usability testing as something that should be short and sweet - the faster a user can do something, the better, right? Well, maybe not. There are some tasks that should take users longer and that people should take their time doing. In this wonderful article, Carl does a great job talking through how we should consider the proper length of ideal task times through completion- versus emotion-oriented activities.