Category: User experience
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lessons from triathlon
Two years ago I signed up for a half-iron distance triathlon. I’d never done a triathlon before. I wasn’t living an active lifestyle, but the date was on the calendar and I was committed. I trained for eight months to cover 70.3 miles by swimming, biking, and running. Training required…
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good design
You’ve probably heard it before: when designs work well, they go unnoticed, fading into the background of our lives. This idea comes from phenomenology, with concepts like ready-to-hand and present-to-hand, which suggest that we notice things when they fail or don’t work as intended. I notice things when they don’t…
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give customers faster horses
Innovation is driven by a desire to solve problems and meet customer needs. But how can we develop groundbreaking solutions if we don’t listen to what customers say they want? If I got a nickel every time someone said “Don’t listen to what customers say. Watch what they do…” I’d…
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unpacking bias in design and research
As industry practitioners, we pride ourselves on creating innovative solutions and conducting groundbreaking research. But, how often do you reflect on how personal and professional values and priorities influence your work? To work towards more inclusive, ethical, and effective design and research practices, we gotta recognize these biases. Design and…
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crucial ux research skill: influence
As a UX researcher, it’s a given that your subject matter expertise–be it in qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods research–plays an important role in your work. A skilled researcher is an effective researcher. But, doing effective research may not be enough to drive business or customer outcomes. Enter another critical…
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good product management
I recently started Stanford Online’s PM course, and one of the first pre-readings assigned was a blog post by Ben Horowitz, Good PM / Bad PM. It’s an old post, but you can find several more recent attempts (not by Ben Horowitz) that riff on the same core ideas. There…
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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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better communication means better product
Many product development problems are complex or [shudder] wicked. They’re more intricate than they may seem, they change over time, and they involve humans. It may seem paradoxical, then, to say that a significant contributing factor to product dev problems is simple to express: communication is the problem someone somewhere…
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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…
jordan beck, phd 