Beyond the Usability Lab

5.5. Recoding Data and Creating New Variables

This section reviews common ways to create new variables and guidelines for recoding variables. Recoding and creating new variables will make your analysis more meaningful by focusing on data that matter to your audience. We like to think of the original set of variables as the building blocks.

5.5.1. Success data

The most common way to recode success variables is to convert text data to numbers, so “1” represents task success and “0” represents task failure (see Figure 5.1). Some applications return values of “success” and “fail” for each task. This is based on the participant's response compared to the responses you have marked as correct. Converting success data from string to numeric format ...