The most persuasive argument I ever gave for UX research was a piece of paper pinned to the hallway next to my office. I had created an organizational map to understand how the organization grouped different teams and had stuck it to the wall on a whim.
But because of…
There’s no getting around it: sometimes life sucks as a UX Designer in a low UX maturity organization.
There may be frustrations as teams shoot down your ideas or even ignore UX, and it may seem like there’s nothing that you can do.
Few things are as frustrating as arbitrary constraints that prevent you from implementing an easy design solution.
As UX Designers, we may have gotten used to swapping stories about nightmare clients, where you had to design with some truly awful constraints. …
I realized the power of tagging when a quote six months ago helped inform our design decisions. We had gone through the laborious process of tagging our user testing and interview notes back then, and I thought it was a waste of time. But an issue arose later on about…
It is always painful when you realize a design error during user testing. When building a large-scale prototype, we had a small oversight: two buttons were labeled the same but did different things. The previous design had been a modal window, so you’d click the “Add Hospital” button, which would…
Our team almost had to consider throwing out a portion of our quantitative user test because some of our users canceled on us.
We needed to look at Time-on-Task to answer one of our research questions. This meant we needed to have enough users to provide statistically significant comparisons.
Learning to use metadata has made my research analysis process much more organized, insightful, and easier to do. It’s a small extra step you can do during user testing that can impact organizing and categorizing your research spreadsheets. …
One of the most important lessons I learned about user research was rejection by an experienced IBM job interviewer.
He asked me a simple question: “How would you go about doing user research in a hospital setting if they rejected your plan for user testing?” …
Right now is when many UX practitioners, especially those in academia or government, are feeling lost.
The next fiscal year is around the corner, and sometimes that comes with the news that your project won’t be funded for the following year.
Sometimes it’s sudden; sometimes, you have weeks to process…
You might be mistakenly talking about your user research findings like it’s a quantitative study, and you may not even realize it.
It’s not a mistake that you’re making out of malice, and it’s not even entirely your fault. …
6xTop writer in UX Design. UX, Data Viz and Data Science. Author of Persuading with Data: https://tinyurl.com/rndb9bw. Substack: dataanddesign.substack.com
