Recent Posts

Business Design / Learning From Others

Somewhere Between Vulnerability and Design Thinking

Posted by

My story of discovering, first-hand, how important psychological safety is to teams pinning their innovation hopes on frameworks like design thinking. I sat up from the exercise mat I was lying on and pushed myself off the gym floor. I hustled over to the window sill where my jacket, water bottle, and phone sat. I anxiously fumbled to unlock my phone and to tap the rewind button on the audio book, Dare to Lead, I was listening to so I

Continue reading
Personas

Do You Know Your Users?

Posted by

You think you’re just like everyone else. You think your thoughts, opinions, values, and habits are just the same as other people. Psychology calls this the false consensus bias1 because we assume much more commonality than reality warrants. False consensus bias contributes to making bad decisions when we design software. Alan Cooper noted this type of bias while wondering why otherwise smart, talented people often created such crappy software. He invented the persona-based design methodology to help facilitate insight into

Continue reading
Design Principles / Social UX

Designing for Meaningful Social Interactions

Posted by

The age of cheap “like”-hunting needs to come to an end. It all started innocently enough with likes and tweets. Then in a few years, we suddenly ended up with governments scoring people and masses manipulated into meaningless activities to generate more ad revenue. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Now the time has come for us—designers, working on digital products—to step up our game and act like real gatekeepers.

Continue reading
Workplace and Career

UX Design Careers in 2018 and Beyond: The Future of the UX Designer

Posted by

At the time of this writing, a search for UX design jobs on job finder Glassdoor reveals almost 20,000 open positions in the United States alone. By another source, the number is 24,000, with a 22% projected growth rate in the next ten years. Salaries vary between USD$60,000 to $127,000 annually, with the median salary for 2017 being $77,000. With a significant spike year-to-year, the median salary in 2018 is $93,000 in the States, with the coasts offering the highest paying

Continue reading
Search and Metadata / User Centered

Content Recommendations and the Creation of Emotions

Posted by

This article investigates content recommender systems. Because Netflix is probably the best known recommendation system and numerous articles have been published about their system, I will concentrate on their content recommendation mechanism as representative of the type. I will show that the Netflix mechanism contains characteristics of updated theories of emotion—mainly constructed emotions theory—but it still lacks several essential components. The lack of these components can explain some inaccuracies in Netflix recommendations and can suggest broader implications.

Continue reading