fordes

As UX Designers and UX Researchers, we often talk about problems and user needs as “found”, “uncovered” and “arrived at”.

I was going through a guide on Design Thinking⁶ and the language used suggested that the process of design research is like going through a landscape¹:

• The Method …

E. Raymonds Essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” is an essay on Open Source development. It is not about open source as a legal construct but about a possible development style of bottom-up activities in a community of creators. This bottom-up style Raymond calls “bazaar” and contrasts it with the …

I thought it would be interesting to review what I tried to learn from books in the past. Learning is probably the easiest if you can learn it from a mentor by direct participation. Nevertheless, we put a lot of stuff in books and have people (like me) learn from …

TL;DR: Rule-based evaluations for usability are an efficient way to improve interfaces

There are a lot of designs that could be improved. The “right” way to do this is testing with users while applying the appropriate method for the appropriate questions. After all, User Experience design is an empirically …

TL;DR: Make fieldnotes in a document shared with the participant, go over the notes together at the end of the research session

In qualitative research I do at work, participants of the research talk to me and demonstrate things while I (or a note taker) write notes to remember …

I came across participatory design when I was wondering how software like Mediawiki, Firefox or LibreOffice could be produced: The software is understood as being created by by different groups of people: employees, hired by the software’s supporting organizations, volunteer programmers, and user communities with various degrees of involvement …

This post started as a presentation I gave to a group of computer science students in a HCI class as an invited practitioner. My first intention was to “talk about work”, show some currently worked-on projects and introduce to the order and mess of roles, projects and tasks in software …

"The view, that purposeful action is determined by plans, is deeply rooted in the Western human sciences as the correct model of the rational actor."

– Lucy Suchman in Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions, p. 27

Plans are deemed to be important. But what do plans do? And what do …

Since several years, I write on a “Beg­inner’s Guide to Finding User Needs”. One of my recent changes was the first section about why one should do user research. It is titled “User research helps you to create more useful products” ¹.

So, how does user research do …

At the WikidataCon 2017 I organized a participatory design workshop on documenting and sharing Wikidata editing workflows. Here, I describe what we did. It should be sufficient information to organize such a workshop yourself. I used similar methods before, but this particular way is new, so if you try it …