You may be losing a lot of useful information if you treat an expert interview like a user interview.

That’s one of the lessons I learned early on in my career.

On one of the first interviews I ever took notes for, my mentor seemed to veer off script, asking questions that weren’t part of the testing process and seemingly spending most of the time chatting about something else. I voiced my concerns during the debrief, only to be told that this person was one of the foremost experts in the field we were studying.

It was only further along…

Learning just 100 lines of code can save you hours of fixing your user research data. And it’s less frightening than you might think.

I’ve recently been spending a lot more time with the quantitative side of user research. Between surveys with 100+ participants, tracking metrics across multiple design iterations, and working with Google Analytics, I’ve gotten to experience the ‘joys’ of working with real-world datasets.

These joys include reading Excel spreadsheets until my eyes crossed, trying to track down missing values, and a whole lot of inconsistencies across multiple design iterations.

But after messing around with the typical tools…

I never thought I’d address one of my most dreaded phrases by trying to organize my user research findings. But that’s what happened when I took a proactive approach in organizing my user research notes.

Creating a high-level summary in my spreadsheet allowed me to not only quickly revisit user research and understand the context: it also allowed me to compare design alternatives across different design iterations. And that was a crucial factor in reconsidering design alternatives in a time crunch.

Avoiding poor design decisions due to time pressure

I was forced to examine other possible design alternatives for a feature when it turned out that our design…

One of the worst user research interviews I ever participated in was when we attempted to get our stakeholders involved with user research.

The stakeholder accidentally joined the wrong link to take notes, and they just so happened to be the boss of this otherwise anonymous participant.

Because his name was visible on the call, our poor participant started to advertise how good the current product was.

The stakeholder, the team, and the user probably knew that the product was badly designed, but the sudden appearance of his boss meant that the participant didn’t dare cut any corners.

In fact…

I inadvertently stumbled upon a solution to one of my backlog woes just recently.

When I first ran into problems with my Agile backlog, I found that visualizing the individual backlog items definitely improved communication regarding how the user stories were worded.

However, I hadn’t realized that I’d unintentionally stumbled upon a larger concept called User Story Mapping.

But it was only recently when I was forced to split time between different stages of a project that I learned of its’ importance.

A collision with hand-off

The project that I’ve been working on recently was much larger than I’m used to, which meant that…

The last step of the user research process can sometimes be the hardest. You may have done all of the user research, collected great data, and have created some slides that capture vital insights for the project.

But your audience sometimes may not get what you’re trying to tell them.

However, there’s a simple step that you can take to try and make it easier for your stakeholders to understand: adapt the structure of your presentation.

And to understand why to let’s think about why some user research presentations work better than others.

Facts alone fall short.

If you’ve done enough user research presentations…

One of the most interesting things that I’ve found is that working with advanced visualizations often requires a sharper design eye.

While bar and line charts have been around for decades, there may sometimes be situations where a different (and newer) visualization is more suitable.

In these situations, I’ve found that my design fundamentals have been tested, as this often involves taking multiple types of data and encoding it into a single visual. And to illustrate this, let’s talk about a chart that’s emerged in the modern day: bullet charts.

Bullet charts: combining quantitative and qualitative data

If you were asked to combine qualitative and quantitative data…

More than any other chart in my work life, Flowcharts have probably had a greater impact on changing my projects' direction, focus, and design.

But I never gave them a second thought until I had to generate two flowcharts at the same time: it was only then that I saw the impact they had on both the user and business process.

The process to create one is often quite tricky. But it’s not because flowchart design is overtly hard: it’s the opposite.

Because you’re often developing flowcharts with other team members, there may be multiple overlapping flowcharts that you could…