Author: Alesha Arp

Alesha Arp is a senior UX research leader, and catalyst of human-centered change. She’s turned a research lens on organizations, cross-functional teams, processes, digital & physical places and products to create human-centered, desirable, usable, impactful experiences. She is a speaker, writer, and mentor in this community of people and practice. She’s been dubbed a “polar bear wrangler” for her work with the information architecture conference, and “insights wolf” for her ability to hunt and nurture the insights that lead to impactful change for organizations and teams.

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Discovery, Research, and Testing / Foundational Thinking / User Centered

Focus on Usage Maturity: Part III

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Using a Usage Maturity Matrix to Make Design and Strategy Decisions Early Foundations You may recall from earlier installments in this series, that usage maturity is a measure of users’ comfort and familiarity with, and degree of use of, a product, process or place.   During our master’s capstone research at Kent State, my project partner and I explored the varied levels of usage maturity of participants using Apple’s voice assistant Siri and found usage maturity did not coincide with participants’

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Design Principles / Discovery, Research, and Testing / Process and Methods

Focus on Usage Maturity: Part II

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Meet Users Where They Are, Draw Them Deeper In If we want users to remain our users, we ought to entice them deeper into our design ecosystem. Attempts to extend or expand users’ usage, frequently results in designs complicated by added features, and functions. My user experience research has informed digital and physical designs often with an emphasis on correcting the usability of such complexities. Users interact with the things we design at varying levels of usage maturity. Usage maturity

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Case Studies / Design Principles

Focus on Usage Maturity: Part I

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Designing for All Users by Starting at the Beginning Far too often, products are designed to meet the needs of the typical user. As a user experience researcher, I’m always cautious about defining the “typical user” for any of the digital or physical products I work on. My UX research has included work on business processes, websites, services, software platforms, digital games, physical products,  and physical properties. I prefer to use a usage maturity matrix and design to meet the

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