What are emerging areas for applying user research that you are excited about? In this video, I share a bit about what's been interesting to me of late. What about you?
(link to Interviewing Users, second edition, in the next post)
#User#UserExperience#UX#UserResearch#AI: "Anthropomorphism, the inclination to ascribe humanlike qualities to machines, has long been used to manufacture a sense of connectedness between people and technology. We—people—remained users. But if AI is now a thought partner, then what are we?
Well, at least for now,we’re not likely to get rid of “user.” But we could intentionally default to more precise terms, like “patients” in health care or “students” in educational tech or “readers” when we’re building new media companies. That would help us understand these relationships more accurately. In gaming, for instance, users are typically called “players,” a word that acknowledges their participation and even pleasure in their relationships with the technology. On an airplane, customers are often called “passengers” or “travelers,” evoking a spirit of hospitality as they’re barreled through the skies. If companies are more specific about the people—and, now, AI—they’re building for rather than casually abstracting everything into the idea of “users,” perhaps our relationship with this technology will feel less manufactured, and it will be easier to accept that we’re inevitably going to exist in tandem." https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/04/19/1090872/ai-users-people-terms/
Agile was intended to address the problem of waterfall software development: delivering the wrong thing too late.
When "Agile" teams only want to code something once – no acceptance that usability testing might reveal a failing that necessitates another iteration – it's just more waterfall development with Agile-flavoured rituals and ceremonies.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, most of y’all don’t know what it’s like to be a fediverse developer of a popular project and have to deal with all the negative feedback and personal attacks
Let’s be nicer to the devs of the fediverse who have been doing this mostly unpaid for the greater good, all I ask is for basic respect!
Anfora, Prismo, Firefish and dozens of other projects have been abandoned by their devs, and I’d bet the fediverse mentality towards devs is part of the reason
One good way to support the Fediverse's volunteer devs: ask them to work with volunteer design and user-research practitioners who help them to develop and test usable designs – before any substantial code is written.
Testing mockups and prototypes with the community would reduce unhappiness all around.
There was an unintended outcome of tagging ALL observations from every Agile sprint—rather than only tagging observations that related to the current sprint's research focus…
As time passed, some of the qualitative data became quantitative as the sample size grew.
There are some really interesting looking #Contract opportunities to work with the fantastic Team at Scroll available (I've worked with Scroll in the past and would highly recommend them).
Qwerty keyboards are laid out to keep the arms of a mechanical typewriter from hitting each other as you type, because letters that are more commonly used side by side are farther apart on the "keyboard".
Thumb typing has different constraints. There's probably a case for a different keyboard layout, now, to reduce common typos.
Who would research new layouts and the demand? One of the O/S publishers?
We need an equivalent of "this is not financial advice" for design: "this is not based on research."
I've seen countless well-meaning teams say "we will do it this way and then come back to this decision" - and they almost never do. That's because unless you carefully document decision provenance, coming back to the right decisions is impossible.
AI has already been used to run scams, rip off artists, destroy search engines, and drown publishers under an avalanche of shit.
Now AI boosters found a new thing to enshittify: #UserResearch .
"AI research is better than nothing" is the latest in a long series of "bad research is better than nothing" arguments that miss the point of research in the first place.
In situations where you don't have access to users for #UserResearch, #AI is not "better than nothing."
AI is a pacifier. It's far worse than nothing for the product (because the team is fooling itself into thinking they learned something) - but it truly is better than nothing from the perspective of management, because the designers stop bothering them about doing things the right way, and get back to wireframing.
Longer articles facilitate page search, something developers are used to using in one-page API reference sites, reducing the chance of navigation issues. Longer pages allow readers to follow a logical flow and grasp the complete concept. With effective headings and subheadings, it’s easy to locate specific sections without extensive jumping between pages.
There’s nothing wrong with fragmentation per se; it’s just good practice to be conscious of how you split related topics to ensure it is clear how they are connected and avoid fragmentation if it is not necessary.” https://docsgeek.io/blog/posts/task-based-api-docs
There is a contradiction at the heart of lowercase-a #agile - it wants to simultaneously deliver value (be right) and learn (be wrong). As a result of trying to do both, it often succeeds at neither.
The remedy is to untangle discovery from delivery - with #UX methods that are more effective at managing rapid feedback loops.
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I often heared (and said myself) that "what users say is a problem is not the actual problem".
This makes it appear that the problem UxD finds is the actual problem whereas the problem the user names is the one that is not actual and at best a shadow of the actual problem. (Obviously that is great for researchers like me to sell the "actual problem")…
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…What I found more helpful in the end, though, is that there is no problem more actual (they need to be named, framed,argued for in either context). However, the challenge is, that the user describes is rarely the problem that the business can solve or even grasp from their perspective. …
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… So you need some sort of trading between the problem spaces which works best when there is background knowledge about each other’s problems, which can be done by researching how the user acts and thinks, since this just gives you far more opportunities to constructively trade meaning than a mere short problem statement.
There is a consistent undercurrent in business thinking: the belief that there are Thinkers and Users, and all relevant knowledge on Users can and should be obtained by asking Thinkers, because Users lack perspective. This has obvious parallels to "empathy" in #designthinking where people gather in a room to make assumptions about what people outside of that room might want.
Needless to say, these approaches lead to bad decisions. There is no such thing as a user proxy.
Nothing kills the vibe of a user interview faster than when the interviewer listens to an answer and responds with "okay... next question..." without a hint of active listening