Dana Chisnell

Author: Dana Chisnell

  • Talking to strangers in the street: Recruiting by intercepting people

      Intercepting is an exercise in self-awareness. Who you choose and how you approach them exposes who you are and what you think. What your fears are. The inner voice is loud. As a practice, we worry about bias in user research. Let me tell you, there’s nothing like doing intercepts for recruiting that exposes…

  • Deconstructing delight

      Maybe you just read Jared Spool’s article about deconstructing delight. And maybe you want to hear my take, since Jared did such a good job of shilling for my framework. Here’s a talk I did a couple of years ago, but have been doing for a while. Have a listen.  (The post below was originally…

  • The essence of usability testing, in your pocket

    I’ve encountered a lot of user researchers and designers lately who say to me, “I can’t do all the testing there is to do. The developers are going to have to evaluate usability of the design themselves. But they’re not trained! I’m worried about how to give them enough skills to get good data.” What…

  • Why are researchers afraid of developers?

      The other evening I was at a party with a whole lot of UX-y people, some of them very accomplished and some of them new to the craft. I grabbed an egg nog (this is why I love this time of the year!) and stepped up to a cluster of people. I knew a…

  • Rethinking user research for the social web

    While the Web has evolved from flat documents to being fluidly ambient, we’re using user research methods from 1994. In this session, Dana presents 5 major issues confronting UXers working in the social web, challenges you to creative solutions, and shares experiences from pioneering researchers. Watch the video of this talk from ConveyUX in 2013…

  • Gaining design insights from your research recruiting process

    I gave a virtual seminar for UIE in October 2013 about how to look at recruiting participants for studies as bonus user research. You can get the archived seminar from UIE. Or, have a look at the slides.

  • Crowd-sourced research: trusting a network of co-researchers

    Crowd-sourced research: trusting a network of co-researchers

    In the fall of 2012, I seized the opportunity to do some research I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Millions of users would be available and motivated to take part. But I needed to figure out how to do a very large study in a short time. By large, I’m talking about reviewing…

  • Just follow the script: Working with pro and proto-pro co-researchers

    She wrote to me to ask if she could give me some feedback about the protocol for a usability test. “Absolutely,” I emailed back, “I’d love that.” By this point, we’d had 20 sessions with individual users, conducted by 5 different researchers. Contrary to what I’d said, I was not in love with the idea of getting…

  • Heuristics for understanding older adults as web users

    In 2004, Ginny Redish and I, along with Amy Lee, conducted a review of the relevant literature — research by other people — about designing for older adults (people over age 50). Doing this changed my thinking about universal design. It wasn’t enough to generate design heuristics. We also came up with ways to operationalize…

  • Designing for older adults: Reviewing 50 websites

      AARP, an American organization for people over age 50, commissioned Ginny Redish and me to give them a scorecard of how well the Web was supporting older people in terms of design. We weren’t to evaluated sites only directed at older adults, but do conduct a broad review of sites that regular people might…