reflection improves communication

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 […]

better communication means better product

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 […]

Interactivity Profiler

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 […]

Co-designing Platform Collectivism

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 […]

SIGDOC!

Super excited that our (Omar Sosa-Tzec and John M. Carroll) submission to SIGDOC was accepted and that we’ll be publishing a full paper in the ACM digital library to accompany the presentation. The paper takes an existing thread of my research in an exciting new direction, and I couldn’t have done it without the insight […]

new publication

Great news! We have a new publication out today summarizing some of the work we’ve been doing in an online debate community (kialo.com). In particular, we discuss how conflict can serve as well as undermine the work that moderators do, and we highlight ways that UI design could be a scalable way to facilitate conflict […]

Academic Job Interview Questions

I went on the academic job market last fall, and, with help and support from friends, colleagues, and people I’ve never met, I managed to succeed in finding a position at a primarily undergrad institution in Milwaukee, WI. Hooray! More about that soon. Navigating the interviews before arriving at an offer was challenging. I prepared […]

conversations for vision

Another new pre-print dropped this week. This paper is a first draft of our findings from an interview study conducted with a fascinating group of practitioners who work to support people with visual impairments (PVI). Here’s how the service works: PVI connect with a remote sighted assistant via a mobile app and, using a smartphone […]

New(ish) Preprints

I’ve added new preprints in the past few days for the following papers. Enjoy! Designing has no given problems, no given processes, and no given solutions. Jordan Beck, Erik Stolterman (https://osf.io/dz9xr/) A Study of Citation Motivations in HCI Research. Jordan Beck, Bikalpa Neupane, John M. Carroll (https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/me8zd/) Managing Conflict in Online Debate Communities: Foregrounding Moderators’ […]