You might notice that there is nothing more recent than 2022. I'm still producing plenty of content however! Check out my LinkedIn feed as well as my LinkedIn Learning courses. And you can always see where I'll be both virtually and in-person on my ...
In the before times, many of us typically commuted to our place of work, did our job in person and went home. Some of us would be finished working at that point and others of us perhaps put in a few extra hours here and ...
After no travel or in-person research during the initial Covid-19 lockdowns from March until June of 2020, I was excited to start traveling and conducting in-person UX research again, albeit in a more limited Covid-safer way. The research and the travel from July until October ...
Last week, I talked about why I made the decision to accept in-person UX research again even during the Covid-19 pandemic. Now in part two, after two weeks of in-person research, I'll go through my first pass at best practices for conducting individual research sessions in the hope that ...
I’ve read several people’s posts over the past few months saying that no user researcher should do in-person user research until such time as the Covid-19 pandemic has ended. That remote research fully covers all needs until then. That researchers should make a choice not ...
As with probably most of my UX peers around the world, I’ve been working remotely and social distancing because of Covid-19 for about seven weeks now. In that time, I’ve felt very lucky, having managed to go entirely remote without more than perhaps a 10% ...
The offer: Will work for low cost or no cost to do good Effectively immediately, I will offer up any time that I don’t have regular rate UX work to work where it would otherwise be unaffordable to bring on someone of my seniority. If you ...
It was June of 2008 and I was a research director, working in-house at K12.com. I had gotten in my head that maybe it was time to go freelance and after giving it a lot of thought, I decided that the decision was the logical ...
I’ll give you all the details in a moment, but I have lots of time from the remainder of September onward for new project work. TL; DR: As long as work fits within my existing skillset, I look for UX work that is high on adventure, ...
I represent the fifth generation of my family to live in Maryland and have spent about 35 years of my life here in the state. For the past 15 of those years, I’ve lived in the DC suburbs of Silver Spring in Montgomery County, solidly ...
Before saying anything else, I want to be clear that I’m biased. I love in-person interactions with people. Whether it’s user research or just working with colleagues, I’ll go the extra mile or two or a thousand (really!) to get in-person face time. There is a ...
As user experience professionals, we’re a passionate lot. We care deeply about the user – the customers that we design for. We look for meaning. We feel empathy, sometimes painfully so. But in our drive to help those users have meaningful interactions with the products ...
I got a request recently to price out an accessibility audit of a several thousand-page site. The expectation seemed to be that the entirety of the site would be reviewed in some fashion and then the site would be certified in some way to be ...
When I started in user research in 1994 I was titled a “human factors engineer” although I did neither human factors as we’d understand it today nor any kind of engineering. I’ve been privileged to watch user research evolve and grow and grow and grow ...
When I do usability testing, particularly with teams that have not been involved in the process before, I often find myself providing a mini lesson about what usability testing is (and is not!), how the process is going to work, and what they’re going to ...
A family member recently voiced concern about all the traveling that I have been doing. He told me the stress of all the travel seemed unsustainable in the long term, and he couldn’t imagine that I would be able to continue doing so much business ...
One of the most exciting things for me when doing user research is having opportunities to interact with both stakeholders and participants in person. Thus, I gravitate to the kinds of projects where these interactions occur. Most frequently, at least some of the stakeholders who ...
In the decades that I’ve done user research, nearly all of my research has been conducted in English. While I’ve done some research in other countries and with products in other languages, either the product itself was still an English-language product or, when I didn’t ...
Work flow was good… Four weeks ago I was feeling pretty confident about the remainder of 2017. A client had locked in the last week of November for an international usability study and another client sounded reasonably confident that they’d want a large three-part local ...
“You created a bad survey!” exclaimed a participant as we started off day 1 of a recent usability study. I tried to explain gently that the web application she was working on wasn’t actually a survey we had created but the product we were testing, ...
On turning 40 Since my teenage years, I’ve always tried to do some kind of exercise. In those days, I’d go running with my father, go biking on the streets of Baltimore County and go swimming at the pool where I worked as a lifeguard. ...
It was the end of 1994 and fresh out of college, I was hired for my first UX role as a research consultant. I proudly started out in the workforce as a “human factors engineer.” In today’s parlance, I was neither doing human factors nor ...
For the most part, my user research and evaluation freelance work comes through referrals. That means I spend my business development time on being visible and present in the UX/tech world, and then work comes through either people who know me personally or who refer ...
LinkedIn recently published a list of 50 Top Companies in the US and along with that list an inventory of the skills that hiring managers are looking for. As I reviewed the list of skills that were most in demand from the top companies, however, ...
Earlier this week, I explained how a new client, George Washington University Libraries, provided me with access to data from their tool, Social Feed Manager (SFM), to better understand how user experience hashtags are being used. Check out that prior post about user experience hashtags ...
For many years, whenever I gave talks about UX and social media, I told the audience to use the #UX hashtag when posting UX-related tweets. But this advice was only based on my own anecdotal experiences; I’ve personally used the UX hashtag about 1,450 times ...
I often hear from my UX colleagues that they are thinking of going off on their own. They tell me that they’re ready to make the leap to freelancing and think that they have found their first gig – maybe it’s a 3-month contract, or ...
I largely do user experience (UX) research activities such as usability testing, cognitive walkthroughs, ethnography, interviews and focus groups all centered around how users and potential users would interact with existing, updated and new interfaces. Sessions and activities are typically scheduled to last about an ...
I’ve been impressed over the years by how Elon Musk consistently seems to achieve his goals, be it with Tesla, Solar City or Space X, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see his new startup, Neuralink, produce as promised. But that scares me. I’ve spent ...
As someone immersed in technology both personally and professionally, I was a relative latecomer to smartwatch ownership. I had played with smartwatches, but I always found them too sluggish, not good enough as fitness trackers, not waterproof, or lacking their own data connection, particularly if ...
For much of my UX career, I’ve been pretty solidly tied to the Washington DC region. While I’ve never committed to any one specific industry, just given the amount of Federal UX work that has been available locally, Federal-related contracts have been responsible for a ...
Right at the anniversary of my first Lynda.com / LinkedIn Learning course, I had the opportunity to head out once again to sunny Carpinteria, California. I got to record two new courses, both focused on a topic near to my heart - being a freelancer! ...
I’ve enjoyed working as a freelancer for the past 8 years and have largely found that I can maintain a workload that matches what can be done by myself and Edie (the second person on my two-person team). Occasionally, however, the workload goes beyond what ...
I was recently asked by a UX colleague how he might be able to incorporate accessibility into his company’s organizational culture. Although he felt personally that accessibility was very important and even had the budget to hire staff that was knowledgeable in principles of accessibility, ...
Most qualitative usability testing studies that I do involve the creation of a screener early on in the research process. The screener is the product of a necessary effort to determine not only who specifically the expected users are of a product, but also how ...
Over the years, I’ve heard the same question again and again each time a new type of consumer technology starts trending and becoming part of popular culture: “So,” someone asks, “how is this going to change how you do user research?” I heard this question ...
If you have seen “careers” and “artificial intelligence” in the same sentence, it’s likely because there is yet another article wondering whether certain jobs will soon be done faster and more reliably by an intelligent algorithm. Employers who hire UX professionals needn’t worry about their ...
As I considered the cover of the forthcoming UX Careers Handbook (and as a researcher myself), I did a review of the construction of other UX books to see how others had constructed their covers. A number of book covers only had stylized text. Others ...
As a user experience (UX) consultant/freelancer with a small business, whenever there is a new project opportunity, I need to decide whether or not to accept the project. I have to think about how well the project fits with the existing skillset and schedule for ...
No! Yet another [infographic / article / explanation] on what the true difference is between UX and UI design, or between UX and UI development, or between UX design, UI design and UX/UI design. Or between UX development, UI development and UX/UI development. Gah! It ...
