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
Continue readingCategory: Career, Industry & Enterprise
Designing for clients, designing within enterprises, insights from conferences and events, and growing your career. Whether you are new to the design field, or an established professional, you’ll find inspiring guidance in these posts. And perhaps a few warnings of what to avoid.
User Experience Research at Scale
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,
Continue readingHoning Your Research Skills Through Ad-hoc Contextual Inquiry
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
Continue readingCreating Your Personal Mission Statement
You’re weird. In a good way, but weird nonetheless. Weird in the sense that people outside of work likely have absolutely no clue what it is you do. Maybe many at work as well. For me, this weirdness manifests itself
Continue readingHow to Make a Concept Model
I can draw. I went to art school. I studied painting until I fell out with the abstract expressionists and switched to photography. But I can draw. What I cannot do is diagram. I always wanted to. I have models
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