Category: research
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good judgment
Fewer clicks may not be a good proxy for improving digital customer experiences (cx). I get why it’s appealing to index on fewer clicks. It’s easy to measure and, because we can design digital products to reduce the number of clicks required to do something, we can demonstrate measurable impact.…
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second rule of usability: listen to users
I’ve noticed a recent uptick in interest in two provocative articles about user research: (1) First Rule of Usability? Don’t Listen to Users and (2) Walmart’s $1.85 Billion Dollar Mistake. In my view, both of these are being used to advocate for exactly the wrong things. User research involves studying…
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screening research participants
tl;dr know which participants you need to conduct research that generates value and design screeners to ensure that you get them. We recently finished a round of interviews designed to put ourselves in a position to explain how experienced middle school teachers select literary texts to use in their ELA…
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reflection improves communication
tl;dr If you’re not reflecting on your product practices, then you’re going to have a hard time improving them. Today I reflect some more on communication. When you’re the communicator, you have the power to establish a clear frame of reference for your audience in order to minimize the possibility…
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recruiting ux research participants
tl;dr If you need research participants, you’re on a tight deadline to collect data, and you’ve exhausted your personal network(s), including current users of your product, then here are two suggestions that produced decent results for me: (1) get stakeholder buy in so that you can offer good incentives and…
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Visual Thinking + Discourse Analysis
One question many discourse analysts ask when they’re familiarizing themselves with data is: how could things be different? If you’re comfortable messing around with Photoshop and your text includes images, then you can create sketches as a way of making these hypothetical differences more concrete. Sketching is a powerful way…
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New(ish) Preprints
I’ve added new preprints in the past few days for the following papers. Enjoy! Designing has no given problems, no given processes, and no given solutions. Jordan Beck, Erik Stolterman (https://osf.io/dz9xr/) A Study of Citation Motivations in HCI Research. Jordan Beck, Bikalpa Neupane, John M. Carroll (https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/me8zd/) Managing Conflict in…
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You Can Always Start Designing
Over the past few days, I have heard a few students and colleagues say a variation of the following: I don’t know enough to start designing yet. I want to challenge this idea. I don’t think that there is some threshold of knowledge that must be passed before one can…
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Image-based Reference Management
Here are some true statements. (1) Some of my colleagues share paper copies of interesting, relevant research with me. (2) I find new literature on devices that aren’t mine. (3) Manual entry of new literature is sort of a pain on a mobile device. I want to be able to…
jordan beck, phd 