A Digital Response to the Pandemic

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In March 2020, the pandemic stretched across Europe to the UK and Ireland. As the governments of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic began reporting cases of a deadly new coronavirus strain, both health services began to organize expert teams to take on what would be the biggest threat to public health in generations. At Big Motive, we have enjoyed the privilege of working with the health service as part of an integrated and multi-disciplined stakeholder team, charged with combatting

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Taking Research out of the Lab

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To date, usability testing has been largely confined to usability labs. This ensures a controlled environment where users can interact with products or designs and researchers can field questions. The downside of this is not being able to get the context of use of what you are testing. But a recent project for a life science organization cemented the idea that taking user research out of the usability lab yields the best results.

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Focus on Usage Maturity: Part I

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Designing for All Users by Starting at the Beginning Far too often, products are designed to meet the needs of the typical user. As a user experience researcher, I’m always cautious about defining the “typical user” for any of the digital or physical products I work on. My UX research has included work on business processes, websites, services, software platforms, digital games, physical products,  and physical properties. I prefer to use a usage maturity matrix and design to meet the

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Don’t Send Personal Messages Through LinkedIn (Unless You Want People to Hate You)

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Looking through my parents’ storage boxes, I found letters that my mother and father sent one another prior to my existence. This unfathomable world was decades away from mobile phones, public internet connectivity, and social networking. Along with explanations of humorous or ordinary everyday episodes and proclamations of love, the letters included doodles, crossed out words, and long postscriptums. I don’t know if my mother or father ever dabbed some perfume on their letters hoping to evoke butterflies in the

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Case Study: How to Build a Digital User Experience Monitoring System

Most software user experience and product management teams have similar questions: How do users feel about our products? How is our product experience changing over time? How do users feel about a recent change we’ve made in the product? Our user experience (UX) and product teams are no different, so we set up a system that provides an ongoing stream of data that answers these questions and does much more. In this case study, we describe our user experience monitoring

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