Menu
I hope you will find this article engaging, informative, and intelligent. Might you prefer it to be modern, friendly, and fun? How can I make sure I’m achieving that? What do those words even mean to you?Feelings play a critical role in encouraging people to use a product or service. Designs that produce desirable feelings are generally more successful. We collect descriptive evidence of these feelings using think-aloud protocols, observations, interviews, and questionnaires. But how easy is it to capture these feelings and communicate them to stakeholders?Techniques used to elicit verbalizations during usability studies allow some participants to quickly put their feelings into words while others struggle.
People with a limited vocabulary, non-native language speakers, and people who believe their opinion is unimportant often find it difficult to describe their experience. Making sure that the experience of less vocal participants is adequately represented in the results can be a challenge. Giving People Words to Inspire ThemUltimately, we want to help all participants to produce descriptions of their experience in a way that would enable these descriptions to be easily summarized and communicated to stakeholders. To achieve that, we have developed the Look-and-Feel Tool consisting of forty-eight adjectives that are presented to participants at the end of the test session (see Figure 1).The inspiration for the Look-and-Feel Tool came from Miner and Benedek’s “product reaction cards.” They asked people to look through 118 cards with an adjective written on each card, select words that described their experience, and explain why they had selected those words.The act of picking from a pre-defined word list gives participants a broad and shared vocabulary for describing their experience. The eye tracking equipment we use as part of our facilitation process allows us to see participants looking at each word. When they pause, we can ask why a word is attracting their prolonged gaze. The word might not be understood, it might be too strong, too weak, or not quite the right expression of their experience.
Asking about words that capture more attention helps us understand the participants’ experience as well as assess the effectiveness of the word list. Example of one participant’s completion of the online Look-and-Feel Tool How Did We Choose the Words?The adjectives were generated based on our experience of running hundreds of usability tests. Example of summarized results from the Look-and-Feel Tool What Does It Mean to You as a UX Expert?The tool can be used with diverse products and services to allow different user populations to describe their experiences. We’ve used it across dozens of usability studies that include retail websites, non-profit organization websites, entertainment websites, and mobile phone services.Over the last year, we’ve compiled a database of more than 300 participants’ word selections. We found that people more often report experiencing easy than satisfying, with engaging being chosen the least frequently of the three adjectives. These relative selection rates could reflect the design’s ability to produce, or fail to produce, these experiences.
You can describe your experience for the position you are applying for by telling what you have done in your past that make you the perfect candidate for this job. Describe a time or job that.
However, selection rates could also reflect the participants’ understanding and use of these words in everyday language. The low selection rate of engaging could be due to the fact that it’s not a common word for describing experiences.
Unlike Likert scale questions, the Look-and-Feel Tool gives people the option to ignore words that are not part of their normal vocabulary. Making It BetterThe Look-and-Feel Tool is not a perfect solution.
An obvious shortcoming is a bias towards picking positive words. We considered grouping words into two categories, positive and negative, and requiring participants to pick some from each group. We chose not to adopt this approach because our classification of positive and negative words might not map to the meanings that participants attribute to the words in a particular context. For example, serious might be a positive word for a form and a negative word for a game.If we wanted to group the words into positive and negative, we would either have to reassess those groupings for every product, or restrict the words to those less affected by context, such as confusing or frustrating. Another possible way of managing the positive bias is to require participants to choose an equal number of what they consider to be positive and negative words.Based on participants’ feedback, we are replacing words that may be difficult to understand. Words such as condescending and gimmicky have already been replaced.The basic idea of allowing people to choose words from a list is simple and powerful.
But is producing one set of words that can be used by any user population for any product or service a realistic target? What words should be included? And how many words? Feel free to use our list, see how it works for you, and further improve it.
Find Spain on the list. Hint: Start from the bottom. The unprepared teacher failI was about 10 when I started at a local private language school. I had no clue I was about to face the worst English learning experience of my life.My teacher was a young native speaker guy, very blond, very tanned and with a white shiny smile.
He was calm, polite and stress-free, which shouldn’t have been a bad setup. But, he would talk about princesses, fairies, teddy bears, cute dragons and caterpillars! I’m not in Reception class anymore, mate.
His input was making us go backwards, when we had proudly left all of these things behind. I guess in his mind he was teaching ‘Young Learners’ as if it was a single classification block: 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10 year olds, they’re all kids, aren’t they?As if that wasn’t enough, we didn’t understand his instructions, we didn’t understand him conveying the meanings, we didn’t understand the listenings.
On the one hand he was over-childish, and on the other hand, he was a couple of levels above the Lower Intermediate we needed. English seemed a very difficult thing, which I didn’t enjoy.It’s very sad that sometimes the less prepared teachers are sent to Young Learners groups.
Even if you are a ‘Young Learner’, you can tell who is a good teacher and who is not. I still remember. The ‘Aha’ momentAfter the last experience, my parents enrolled me at a different local academy, known for being strict and focusing on achieving high results. The course I joined was 4.5 hours per week – that, added to my 3h from school, made a total of 7.5 hours of English per week.I was quite motivated to learn English: I listened to Green Day and Offspring and I wanted to understand their lyrics.I remember a lot from those days. Some random new words, like ‘smuggler’ or ‘UFO – Unidentified Flying Object’, the voice of the listenings saying ‘ Section B. Listen ’ (on cassette, yes), or a great bunch of stress time dialogues still BY HEART.From ‘ ’ (Mortimer 1985: CUP)The class couldn’t have been more teacher-centred. There were about 10 of us sitting around a big white rectangular table, headed by the teacher, by the whiteboard.
We only spoke with the teacher’s permission, one by one, usually in seating order. Breaking that thick silence was a bit scary.
Even coughing was a bit stressful.In every lesson we did a unit of (OUP: 1978), which consisted of a reading, its pertinent listening, vocabulary and exercises in the workbook for homework. The materials felt old-fashioned for the 2000s, but I loved them. The illustrations (finally nothing too childish or pretentious!), the pages weren’t too shiny so you could write notes on them, the composition was balanced (not too much information) and they had a subtle sense of humour. They were designed for adults, but I’m glad we used them instead of any flashy modern book for teens. They mentioned alcohol and smoking like a natural thing, and I’m sure being exposed to that content had no connection whatsoever with my future consumption, or not, of them.Despite this old-school setting, it was in that room I had the ‘aha’ moment: I felt I understood English, I got it and it would stick there forever. Like when you learn how to ride a bike, drive a car or swim, there is a moment that you can ride, drive or swim.
I felt I could write down a sentence or say it out loud, and I would be able to tell if it sounded good or not, like if I had a native English inner voice (!).I feel very proud of this moment, and I am sure it made a difference to my journey. Having a solid foundation made me feel motivated to keep walking ahead. 12 weeks in Malta: the intermediate euphoriaThis was the time when I was a lucky newly qualified Primary teacher, and I was given a grant by the Spanish government to go to an English speaking country to take a 12 week English course. I chose lovely Malta and a General English 30h/pw course.I felt I was doing the best I could do at that point in my life: personal development – new country, new friends, new experiences – plus accelerating my English proficiency, that at some point would help my professional development.
Being there meant what in Catalan we say ‘ el seny i la rauxa ’, which means the right balance between obligations and pleasure, acting sensibly and having fun.My fluency was improving at an incredible speed. I could speak with everybody, understand everybody, even have meaningful conversations. My friends were students from the Czech Republic, Japan, Korea, Germany, Turkey, Spain so none of them was a native speaker. We were communicating through intermediate level English, and I had the illusion that I could speak English.
In fact, I could speak, but I would find out later I still had many rocks to climb 5. Blended learning: lack of UX is lack of joyA few years after passing my First Certificate in English (FCE), I found some time to prep for the Certificate in Advanced English (CAE).
I thought of it like the English ceiling: that’s pretty much it, isn’t it? Or maybe it was just that I knew very few people who had passed it.I found a private language school that suited my needs. The course structure was one hour face-to-face and one hour ‘English Lab’ AKA ‘independent study’, two days per week. I loved the face-to-face classes, and my chatty Scottish teacher, so that was a green tick. There were only three of us enrolled on the course, and not everyone always turned up, so I had one-to-one lessons very often. That was another green tick.And here comes The ‘English Lab’. Imagine a hot room, filled with PCs and students with headphones and bored faces.
The first day they showed me around, and told me: ‘do as many exercises as you can’. I was shocked. Is that actually an instruction? How do I know I am doing it right? Students didn’t have a personal account, or any sort of scoring system where you could track your progress. It was more like do ‘as much as you can’ and then you’re lost in the middle of the ocean.But hey, I’d paid for my course and I thought I should give it a go.
Well, sometimes the headphones weren’t loud enough to be heard over the background noise, so doing listenings was a struggle. I had no teacher checking my progress, so I started questioning why I was doing all those boring exercises.
And finally, the PCs were older than mine. You know how that feels.I ended up skipping ‘The English Lab’ and going to the library to do (printed) practice tests.
You had to be really motivated to learn English in that room. Everything is a lie, but EUREKA!After passing CAE, I moved to London to au pair for a native speaker family. I’d never heard such words as ‘supper’ – all my life it was ‘dinner’! And the same for ‘loo’, wasn’t it ‘toilet’? Also no one had ever told me you could say ‘telly’ instead of ‘TV’, or ‘specs’ instead of ‘glasses’ or that ‘monkey’ could also be a verb, or that you could just make up words by adding a ‘y’ or ‘ish’ at the end, like ‘thingy’, ‘techy’,‘yellowish’. Did I just say I passed the Certificate in Advanced English?I felt almost as frustrated as I ever had before in my English journey. I thought CAE meant I spoke English fairly well, but I was still struggling to communicate naturally in everyday situations.
Maybe because I never did before?Kito and Mila were 6 and 8 years old back then, and they are the the best teachers I have ever had. They showed me English in action, and this is what I exactly needed. They corrected me if I was wrong – especially my pronunciation when I was reading them stories – and they taught me extremely useful words such as ‘gooey aliens’ or ‘dandylion’.
Sometimes they explained words to me and we recorded it on video. This is one of my favourites:Dandylion is a plant that grows in the ground, when it’s a teenager it grows some little spikes, when it’s a grown up it has lots of them all around it. When people walk passed them they think they have to say some wishes, and I just picked up one and I made a wish. I am not telling you though!About 6 months after living with them, one night I was falling asleep watching an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I used to watch it with English subtitles, otherwise I missed too much.
To be honest, though, it was a bit of a hassle, because I had to find them and load them separately. That night I forgot to load them and guess what?! I understood Larry David.Photo: ConclusionI learned English in many formats: locally, abroad, face-to-face, online, one-to-one, in a monolingual class, in a multilingual class, with and without books, in General English courses, Exam preparation courses, compulsory, after school, in a language exchange, in summer camps, at University, informally, with a native speaker host family, with native speaker colleaguesI even speak English with my boyfriend!The amount of time put into my English learning is uncountable. If we tracked the time spent – if we it, as we do at ELTjam – it would be the most expensive project ever. I could have built an app with all that money or travelled the world by bicycle many times!So, why did I do it?This month it’s been 1 year since I passed my CELTA.
My approach to teaching was, without doubt, shaped by my experience as a learner: I was one of them not so long ago. I really wanted to care about my students, understand their needs and help them, while having a good time.
The truth is that I was deeply worried about their reactions. I feared them not paying attention, speaking about other stuff, feeling bored. I wanted to come up with very engaging activities that they would love. In a nutshell, I wanted to provide an amazing learning experience.That could sound a bit ambitious, as there are many things to handle when doing CELTA, and I am not sure if student engagement is yet an evaluation criteria on TP2. But I had a bunch of principles that I unconsciously followed.