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Clarity

Ripul Kumar

Hyderabad, India

CEO of a UX strategy consultancy. Consults with Fortune 500 and startups. Mentor at several accelerators, VCs, and Angels to evolve UX Strategy for invested companies. Teaches at leading design schools.

$2.00/min

5 Calls

5 Reviews

27 minutes
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User Research User Experience UX Design Thinking Usability Usability Testing Ethnography UX Strategy Usability Engineering

Answers 5
Reviews 5

Answers

Ripul Kumar answered

What's your opinion on using something like usertesting.com vs. real time usability testing (online and offline)?

Usabilitytesting.com recruits users from a pre-selected panel of users who have given consent to be a part of usability tests in general. When you test with these set of users, what you hope to catch are low-lying usability fruits like fonts, colors, labels, widgets, etc.

Key issues like navigation and intended behaviour nuances will not get addressed as the users are not 'intrinsically motivated' to complete the tasks. The users are neither motivated to apply for a Certificate of Deposit online nor interested in buying a pair of hiking shoes online for the upcoming K2 climb.

Usabilitytesing.com is great for things which most people regularly do online - buy pizza, check account balance, etc. However, it is not good to conduct in-lab usability testing when specialized people with intrinsic motivation for completing a task are required.

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Usability Testing

Usability

User Experience

Ripul Kumar answered

If you launch a product to a few different countries, does it make sense to do usability testing in all those different countries?

It can be safely assumed that people from different cultures will behave differently with the same product. They have different aspirations, motivations, circumstances in which they use a product, use cases, and social meanings.

If you are launching the product in countries that are very different culturally, it makes sense to conduct usability testing in different countries.

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Usability Testing

Usability

User-centered Design

Ripul Kumar answered

Have you ever used a user research recruiter? Do you recommend it for finding participants for user research?

My company works with user research recruiters regularly. Here are some insights about agencies before you go ahead and employ one:

1. How may user research recruitments have they done earlier. The more experienced they are, the more they understand that user research recruitments are done on psychographics and not on demographics alone (as in Market Research). If the agency is not experienced, you would have to work a lot to get them to deliver acceptable quality of recruitments.

2. User recruitment agencies can be found across the globe. While working with them in different countries, we have found out that agencies from high trust countries (like Singapore) usually found far better participants with negligible screening. However, in low trust countries (like India), agencies will provide participants of 'passable' quality with a lot screening time at your end.

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Customer Development

User Research

Ripul Kumar answered

I've been hearing a lot of buzz around card based UIs lately. Has anyone implemented something similar in their product recently. Pros and cons?

What does a card really do?
- It helps clearly group information
- It helps group information with relevant tasks
- It can help to show quantity of information according to need
- It can help show other aspects of information normally not seen upfront

There are several ways to group information as per the need of the users and brand. Graphic designers and user experience designers have been grouping information as a part of their job.

In the recent times, a lot of people needed to group and categorise information. However, without the knowledge of Gestalt's Laws and training in graphic design, it is a guessing game for anyone. At that time, card based UIs came to rescue - they did the job perfectly - and looked good too!

So, if you and your designers have zero training in graphic design, and you have an information heavy website/application, card based UIs can be good.

And, one word of caution, group information that makes sense to users together (even if it comes from different database tables). Do not naturally group information that are columns in the same table in the database!

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User Experience

User Acquisition

Ripul Kumar answered

What vendors can help me develop a rich target persona (demographic + behavioral + psychographic characteristics) and then find those people online?

UX research companies are your best bet for creating personae. They understand a lot about your users from you and your team, then go on the field and talk to a certain number of users (online or face-to-face), they will finally create rich personae for you.

If you want to conduct conceptual testing of your product or service, UX research companies will help you find right people and run formative or validation research.

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Behavioral Targeting

Online Advertising

Targeted Advertising

Reviews

You can tell Ripul is an UX expert because he quickly understood our requirements and was able to deliver clear actionable insights that will meet our business objectives.

Geoff Newman Source: Clarity

Ripul has a lot of practical experience in the field of usability testing. I definitely recommend talking to him if you need help with user research.

Bartosz Malutko Source: Clarity

Ripul made important contributions in enhancing the usability of QuickRules.NET. He also educated the team in thinking about usability while designing features. He has a very good grasp of his subject and a very methodical and rigorous way of arriving at the design.

Suresh Gopalakrishnan Source: LinkedIn

Ripul has deep expertise in the field of user experience, and possesses a level of insight that makes him a pleasure to do business with. I worked with Ripul when we hired Kern's services for user studies in India. His quick, effective solutions helped save our investment from an unexpected disaster that nearly canceled testing. He also spotted opportunities for us to collect much more valuable additional study data than we had originally expected, at no additional expense to ourselves. I am deeply indebted to Ripul's capabilities and recommend him as an extremely competent and effective user experience professional.

Jack Beaton Source: LinkedIn

It was my pleasure to work with Ripul on several projects when we were both at Human Factors International. Ripul is always creative, attentive, and energetic on projects. His knowledge of human factors and usability technology and process is extensive. I can always count on his meeting commitments and adding value through insights and hard work.

Dick Rubinstein Source: LinkedIn

Member since September 2013