Learning From Others Archives - Page 5 of 30

When Information Design is a Matter of Life or Death

In 2008, Lloyds Pharmacy conducted 20 minute interviews1 with 1,961 UK adults. Almost one in five people admitted to having taken prescription medicines incorrectly; more than eight million adults have either misread medicine labels or misunderstood the instructions, resulting in them taking the wrong dose or taking medication at the wrong time of day. In addition, the overall problem seemed to be more acute among older patients. Almost one in five people admitted to having taken prescription medicines incorrectly; more

October 7, 2014 Foundational Thinking / Learning From Others

Teaching/Learning UX: Considerations for Academic-Industry Partnerships

Posted by Guiseppe Getto

Higher education is poised to help produce the next generation of user experience designers, but we can’t do it alone. In the wake of Fred Beecher’s recent “Ending the UX Designer Drought” and studies by Onward Search, UserTesting, and the Nielsen Norman Group, it is clear that the UX market is booming and that UX designers enjoy a high level of job satisfaction. It is also clear that too few UX professionals exist to meet current demand. And while apprenticeship

September 16, 2014 Discovery, Research, and Testing / Learning From Others / Workplace and Career

Five Things They Didn’t Teach Me in School About Being a User Researcher

Posted by Chelsey Glasson

Graduate school taught me the basics of conducting user research, but it taught me little about what it’s like working as a user researcher in the wild. I don’t blame my school for this. There’s little publicly-available career information for user researchers, in large part because companies are still experimenting with how to best make use of our talents. That said, in the midst of companies experimenting with how to maximize user researchers, there are a few things I’ve learned

July 29, 2014 Discovery, Research, and Testing / Learning From Others / Process and Methods / User Centered

User Experience Research at Scale

Posted by Nick Cawthon

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

July 15, 2014 Case Studies / Discovery, Research, and Testing / Learning From Others

Honing Your Research Skills Through Ad-hoc Contextual Inquiry

Posted by Will Hacker

It’s common in our field to hear that we don’t get enough time to regularly practice all the types of research available to us, and that’s often true, given tight project deadlines and limited resources. But one form of user research–contextual inquiry–can be practiced regularly just by watching people use the things around them and asking a few questions. I started thinking about this after a recent experience returning a rental car to a national brand at the Phoenix, Arizona,