Category: Blog
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Story-driven experience research on pandemic unemployment
Telling the story of living experts in near-real time
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What can go wrong when we get things right?
Using stakeholder maps to envision outcomes for users and ecosystems
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…