I’ve noticed a recent uptick in interest in two provocative articles about user research: (1) First Rule of Usability? Don’t Listen to Users and (2) Walmart’s $1.85 Billion Dollar Mistake. In my view, both of these are being used to advocate for exactly the wrong things. User research involves studying how people interact with products, […]
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 […]
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 […]
One question many discourse analysts ask when they’re familiarizing themselves with data is: how could things be different? If you’re comfortable messing around with Photoshop and your text includes images, then you can create sketches as a way of making these hypothetical differences more concrete. Sketching is a powerful way to explore the effects of, […]
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’ […]
Over the past few days, I have heard a few students and colleagues say a variation of the following: I don’t know enough to start designing yet. I want to challenge this idea. I don’t think that there is some threshold of knowledge that must be passed before one can start designing. You can always […]
Here are some true statements. (1) Some of my colleagues share paper copies of interesting, relevant research with me. (2) I find new literature on devices that aren’t mine. (3) Manual entry of new literature is sort of a pain on a mobile device. I want to be able to quickly add relevant literature to […]
One of the coolest things about the PLOS paper I was reading this morning — citation at the end of this post — is the way it distinguishes the different author contributions: Sort of like the credits at the end of film/television shows, no? This is a model that other venues ought to adopt. […]
Research through Design (RtD) can be influenced by written text (academic papers) and visual content (images of designs, photos, paintings). So, why not account for the latter in reference lists? Communicating RtD publications could mix bibliographies with iconographies, which would give image-based influences their due credit. Some sketch-proposals (made w/Adobe Sketch on an iPad) for […]
design inquiry 