This case study by a pan-African UX research and design agency offers key insights for companies attempting to...
Tag: user experience
Seismic Shifts or Seasonal Patterns: After a Tough Year for Research, Do We Need Fundamental Change, or Just Patience?
https://player.vimeo.com/video/882708468?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479 In this candid discussion, two leaders in research and ethnography explore what's shifted, why, how much, and how they're guiding their organizations forward through social, macroeconomic, and...
Re-evaluating Usability: Delivering Value via Research Practice
The thought of conducting a usability study may not excite most ethnographically minded researchers. While usability started out as the practical analysis of interactions with user interfaces, there has been an evolution toward devaluing such studies as more mechanical work. With the industry’s...
Art & Imagination in Online Qualitative Research: A New Tool for Brand Listening
At the beginning of the pandemic, I was pretty sure I was done. I had been a qualitative researcher and brand consultant for 25 years. I had spent the past decade building my practice around an approach that centered contextual and imaginative face-to-face research. I called it brand listening,...
Making Tech More Accessible: An Ethnographic Lens on Ability and Disability
EPIC Members Richard Beckwith and Susan Faulkner (Intel) have assembled a panel of luminaries in accessible tech research, design, and engineering for our January 26 event, Seeing Ability: Research and Development for Making Tech More Accessible. In anticipation, we asked them a few questions...
How Ethnographic Methods Make APIs More Usable
Application Programming Interfaces, commonly known as APIs, connect the front-end interfaces we see when we navigate the internet (like websites and apps) to the back-end systems, or databases, that store information. APIs enable people to carry out transactions online, like purchasing goods,...
Accelerating User Research: How We Structure Insights for Speed At Spotify
(This article is also available in Chinese) Instead of asking how we can further speed up research itself, the question becomes how we can better integrate research into the product development practice and speed up organizations’ ability to learn and iterate overall. For many years, insights was...
New Forms of Literacy are Expanding Digital Expression
Some time ago I watched an older Indian woman using Google Assistant to access recipes. She expressed how thrilled she was: her family would be eating new meals and they would appreciate her more. As I looked more closely, it was obvious the cooking instruction video (in Hindi) contained no text....
How to Scale a Culture of Human Understanding
IBM is big. We have around 350,000 employees including 20,000 design and user experience professionals, and only a fraction of them are experienced design researchers. Many of you reading this also work in or with large enterprise organizations and, as you know, at that scale it can be easy to get...
Working with Intuition
PechaKucha Presentation Evidence, today, can have very narrow definitions. For digital products, this type of evidence usually includes clicks and engagement metrics. I believe that in our effort to only listen to numbers and data, we have created a culture that looks down on intuition as...