fordes

If you do anything related to research and data you will have been in contact with numerical summaries, like average, standard deviation and – more complex and more often abused – the sacred p value, tool of truthiness creation in quantitative research. By reducing your dataset to a single value, you reduce …

I thought it would be nice to collect some recent learnings and share them on this blog so I have a motivation to write down what I consider to be interesting

Confirmation bias

In design, people sometimes tend to get stuck with their one solution. This seemed similar to confirmation …

There are several reasons, why the use of images in qualitative research is not very common. A rather obvious one is that is is harder to handle images with technology ¹. Great amounts of text are easily stored and searched, but images and video have vastly larger file sizes and …

On the anthrodesign mailinglist was a recent discussion on »effective deliverables«. Reading through the replies, one stroke a chord in me:

(Highlight by me)

[…] I ve had a few 'aha' moments in my career where I realize I'm basically talking in "user" language and expecting my audience to be able …

TL;DR: The comfort zone is a bullshit concept

When you search for »comfort zone« on google images you’ll get all sorts motivational graphics. There are many circle (»Veen«) diagrams showing that this »comfort zone«-circle does not intersect with some other circle with vague, but nice terms in …

You know the »list of figures« in academic works. But do you know the »list of texts«? ¹ This seems silly, since in almost any (academic) work you have a one text which tells the main content. It may be occasionally supported by images, diagrams or tables if such information …

Recently, I switched from Wordpress to a static site generator – Pelican. Here are some of my experiences. If you don’t want to read the reasons and the techbabble , scroll down and read the summary.

Static site generator?

The best known static site generator is probably the ruby-based jekyll. As …

Each day they are in my Twitter feed, on Facebook, on Hacker News: Articles, suggesting to embrace failure, to develop empathy as an UX research skill and to treat design holistically.

They seem like useful advices. They may come in the best intentions.

Just do it

But the only thing …

Design is a visual and and structural (»organizing«) activity. But for those who design software and websites there is a non-visual world that needs to be navigated and taken into account – text in the form of program code and comments. In addition, text is the predominant mean of creating and …

(see, you do!)

The brain. It seems to be everywhere. People do stuff because their brains told them so and some designs and even this blogpost will rewire your brain. While psychology carries the stigma of the ingraspability of our thoughts and the transience of our actions, the brain is …