Author: Nick Cawthon

Nick Cawthon is a UX practitioner located in the San Francisco Bay Area. His focus has been interaction design, prototyping, and user research on desktop and mobile devices. He has written a book, Aesthetic and the Usability of Data Visualization, published during his time at the University of Sydney while pursing a graduate Human Computer Interaction research degree. Nick is also an event organizer for the local Interaction Designer's Association, where he co-ordinates monthly talks given by leaders within the industry. When not pushing pixels for his consultancy, Gauge Design, Nick enjoys rowing on the Oakland estuary before dawn and is constantly dreaming of new metaphors for the frustrations of corporate stagnation. Follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.

Articles by this author:

Discovery, Research, and Testing / Learning From Others / Process and Methods / User Centered

User Experience Research at Scale

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An important part of any user experience department should be a consistent outreach effort to users both familiar and unfamiliar. Yet, it is hard to both establish and sustain a continued voice amongst the business of our schedules. Recruiting, screening, and scheduling daily or weekly one-on-one walkthroughs can be daunting for someone in a small department having more than just user research responsibilities, and the investment of time eventually outweighs the returns as both the number of participants and size

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Discovery, Research, and Testing / Learning From Others / Process and Methods

Guerrilla Usability at Conferences

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Does your company have display booths at trade shows and conferences? Typically, these are marketing-dominated efforts, but if you make the case to travel, working the booth can be used for user research. Here’s how I’ve done it. Positioning and justification At times it can be a hard internal sell to justify the costs and diversions to take your one- or two-person show on the road, all the while piggybacking off of another department’s efforts. Yet, standing on your feet

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