Dana Chisnell

Author: Dana Chisnell

  • Bonus research: Do the recruiting yourself

    There are some brilliant questions on Quora. This morning, I was prompted to answer one about recruiting. The question asker asked, How do I recruit prospective customers to shadow as a part of a user-centered design approach? The asker expanded, thusly: I’m interested in shadowing prospective customers in order to better understand how my tool…

  • Usability testing is broken: Rethinking user research for social interaction design

    How many of you have run usability tests that look like this: Individual, one-hour sessions, in which the participant is performing one or more tasks from a scenario that you and your team have come up with, on a prototype, using bogus or imaginary data. It’s a hypothetical situation for the user, sometimes, they’re even…

  • Researcher as director: scripts and stage direction

    For most teams, the moderator of user research sessions is the main researcher. Depending on the comfort level of the team, the moderator might be a different person from session to session in the same study. (I often will moderate the first few sessions of a study and then hand the moderating over to the…

  • Is your team stuck in a bubble?

    This happens. The team is heads down, just trying to do work, to make things work, and then you realize it. Perspective is gone. Recently I gave a couple of talks about usability testing and collaboratively analyzing data. There was a guy in the first row who was super attentive as I showed screen shots…

  • Usability isn’t just about eliminating frustration anymore

    [This is an excerpt of an article published in UX Magazine on June 16, 2010.] I’m a devotee of TED talks. I was once assigned to watch several TED talks to deconstruct what made each a good or a bad presentation. TED topics are wide-ranging, though they generally relate to the categories that make up…

  • Overcoming fear of moderating UX research sessions

    It always happens: Someone asks me about screwing up as an amateur facilitator/moderator for user research and usability testing sessions. This time, I had just given a pep talk to a bunch of user experience professionals about sharing responsibility with the whole team for doing research. “But what if the (amateur) designer does a bad…

  • Making sense of the data: Collaborative data analysis

    I’ve often said that most of the value in doing user research is in spending time with users — observing them, listening to them. This act, especially if done by everyone on the design team, can be unexpectedly enlightening. Insights are abundant. But it’s data, right? Now that the team has done this observing, what…

  • You are not your user. No matter how good you think you are.

      Listen up, people. This is why — quantity is not quality — you are not your user.   The lesson for today on participant sampling is Google Buzz. Google has been working on Buzz for some time. And it’s a cool idea. Integrating the sharing of photos, status updates, conversations, and email is a thing…

  • User interfaces make Fast Company’s biggest design moments of the last decade

    Of the 14 items that Fast Company chose to include in its selection of the biggest design moments of the years 2000-2009, there were five that were notable for their importance as breakthroughs in user interface and user experience design. Three were specifically related to technology. I’m guessing that most of us will not think…

  • Easier data gathering: Techniques of the pros

    In an ideal world, we’d have one person moderating a user research session and at least one other person taking notes or logging data. In practice it often just doesn’t work out that way. The more people I talk to who are doing user research, the more often I hear from experienced people that they’re…