I work on interfaces used by college students to search for academic articles. Librarians buy these databases. Librarians happen to be wonderful clients to build products for because they always let you know what they don’t like. A few years
Continue readingCategory: Process and Methods
Simplify your work and your life by learning the tools and techniques that authors have used to conquered gnarly problem spaces. From avoiding burnout to doing scrappy research on a shoestring budget, you’ll benefit from their experience, avoid making the mistakes they made, and go on to make all new mistakes of your own. (Then contribute your learnings back to us!)
Researching User Experience: A Knowledge Ecology Model
When we think of learning environments, we think of books, lectures, databases perhaps. But in my recent research, I discovered that the interactions we have with people in our networks play an even more important role in what we learn
Continue readingGoing Beyond “Yes – and…”
My first experience in improvisational comedy was in 1989. I was a freshman at Texas A&M University. Some of the students in the theater department decided to get an improv troupe started and somehow talked me into joining them. In
Continue readingInformation Architecture’s Teenage Dilemma
Imagine if you will information architecture as a pimply-faced, malcontent teenager. IA is eager to express and redefine itself. It wants to be an individual yet accepted by its peers. It is simultaneously aggravated and apathetic about its parents, mentors,
Continue readingA Truly Ambitious Product Idea: Making Stuff for People
When I was eleven, my parents bought a Mac Plus. It had a tiny monochrome screen, a floppy drive, and 1MB of memory. And it came with something called HyperCard. HyperCard let you make stuff. It had documents called stacks,
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