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 are a few ideas I […]
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 curricula. We recruited people through […]
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 of misunderstanding, accurately convey research […]
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 A lot of the problems […]
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 (2) expand your participant pool […]
Great news! We’ve got another paper out on knowledge construction in design. We introduce something we call the CDH model of design knowledge, which stratifies different bodies of design-specific knowledge into ranked levels. We compare it with existing hierarchical models of knowledge, and describe its unique uses and benefits for both design research and design […]
Last year, along with Omar Sosa-Tzec and John M. Carroll, I published a paper at SIGDOC introducing the concept of visual references. Visual references combine bibliographic information with photographic images, textual annotations, and diagrammatic annotations, in order to communicate what we called design-related intellectual influence. The following diagram distinguishes visual references from traditional, text-based references […]
Stuart Reeves recently gave a talk on a paper he kindly invited me to co-author. It’s a terrific content for anyone interested in the question: what is interaction?
Abstract: We report a codesign effort to envision a community water quality data platform with local stakeholders. We employed interviews, field observations, and hackathons through a 9-month study (ongoing). This codesign effort helps to distinguish our proposal of platform collectivism, in which local resources and stakeholders become more visible, accessible, and engaged with one another […]
design inquiry 