User Centered Archives - Boxes and Arrows

people viewing a complex systems diagram on walls

October 19, 2021 Process and Methods / User Centered

Activating Change: A Designer’s Guide to Systems Thinking

This past year we became acutely aware of how interconnected we all are. The toilet paper shortage gave the world a glimpse at supply chains, and the pandemic as a whole was a crash course in how our healthcare system can handle crises. It can be difficult to envision how we can make a difference even if we know the systems we live in don’t function well for everyone. But what does this have to do with design? Designers make

Focus on Usage Maturity: Part III

Posted by Alesha Arp

Using a Usage Maturity Matrix to Make Design and Strategy Decisions Early Foundations You may recall from earlier installments in this series, that usage maturity is a measure of users’ comfort and familiarity with, and degree of use of, a product, process or place. During our master’s capstone research at Kent State, my project partner and I explored the varied levels of usage maturity of participants using Apple’s voice assistant Siri and found usage maturity did not coincide with participants’

November 24, 2020 Design Principles / Professionalism / User Centered

Customer Experience during a Pandemic

Posted by Lexie Lu

Global pandemics are a challenge for everyone. Customers look to institutions and businesses they already trust for answers. Meanwhile, companies must scramble to figure out the best way to maintain excellent Customer Experience (CX) during unprecedented times. No matter what the economy does, you can take some proactive steps to ensure your customers remain loyal to your brand. Creating an excellent CX takes dedication and focus, especially during a global pandemic.

October 24, 2018 Search and Metadata / User Centered

Content Recommendations and the Creation of Emotions

Posted by Oded Napchi

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.

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