Dana Chisnell

Author: Dana Chisnell

  • Helping policy makers

    Early in 2020, I got to work with a couple of amazing people on exploring what it would mean for policy makers to use the methods and techniques of human-centered design. Alberto Alvarez and Vivian Graubard led the way. Thanks to New America and the Beeck Center for support and publishing.

  • Story-driven experience research on pandemic unemployment

    Telling the story of living experts in near-real time

  • What can go wrong when we get things right?

    Using stakeholder maps to envision outcomes for users and ecosystems

  • Can we design a better ballot?

    Every presidential election cycle, people get interested in why ballots are the way they are, so every few years, I give a talk about that. I’ve updated my talk about ballot design for 2020.

  • The epic journey of American voters

    Every 4 years, I get a lot of requests to talk about design in elections from the UX and civic tech communities. Watch the talk at Midwest UX in 2018. I’ve also written quite a bit about the hurdles that U.S. voters encounter, based on research I did before and while I was at the…

  • Delight resources

    A key element of designing for delight is understanding where your product is in its maturity. One way to look at that is through the lens of the Kano Model. You can learn about the Kano Model and our addition of pleasure, flow, and meaning through a couple of sources: Read Jared’s article on understanding…

  • Framework for research planning

    One of the tricks to making sure that I’ve designed the right study to learn what I need to learn is to tie everything together so I can be clear from the planning all the way through to the results report why I’m doing the study and what it is actually about. User research needs…

  • What to do with the data: Moving from observations to design direction

      This article was originally published on December 7, 2009.    What is data but observation? Observations are what was seen and what was heard. As teams work on early designs, the data is often about obvious design flaws and higher order behaviors, and not necessarily tallying details. In this article, let’s talk about tools…

  • Observers are your friends

      (This article was originally published on May 30, 2008. This is a refresh.)   Research that you do alone ends up in only your head. No matter how good the report, slide deck, or highlights video, not all the knowledge gets transferred to your teammates. This isn’t your fault. It just is. So what…

  • Call centers as a source of data

    Usability testing is a fantastic source of data on which to make design decisions. You get to see what is frustrating to users and why, first hand. Of course you know this. There are other sources of data that you should be paying attention to, too. For example, observing training can be very revealing.  One of…