I was talking to someone recently about doing some work with them. They said ‘can you send me some examples of documentation you’ve done lately’ - they wanted this to check that I could do what I said I could. Fair enough. Except, aside from the fact that all the documentation I’ve done lately is [...]

It’s been almost a year now that I’ve been doing predominantly ‘guerrilla’ design research. For me, this means testing in the field with a minimum of time, budget and fuss so that this kind of activity and the insight it provides is available to pretty much any client/budget/timeframe.
One of the first challenges for guerrilla design [...]

Word on the street is that the benefit of User Centred Design is hard to prove… I’m a fan of UCD as a process and I think that it is difficult to measure where process has been central to outcome, but today that’s a tangent. Part of the argument that is made is that a [...]

(a quick definition, given that I’ve discovered that English is at least three separate languages: to rock out = to perform exceptionally well and give great satisfaction, as say, a rock band might ‘rock out’ on stage’.)
These days when I’m doing any kind of user research, rather than going to my secret consultant place and [...]

Have you read the Agile Manifesto lately? If you’re doing Agile work then hopefully you’ve come across it. I always find it a really good touchpoint to come back to when thinking about what *is* and *isn’t* Agile - much more useful than looking at how any one particular flavour of Agile or one companies [...]

I had the opportunity to present a talk on the power of iterative methodologies over waterfall at dConstruct last week (a.k.a Waterfall Bad, Washing Machine Good). This is an extended re-mix of a talk that I gave very briefly at the IA Summit earlier this year (I also presented a similar talk at UX Week [...]

I ran a workshop on Collaboration, Creativity & Consensus for User Experience Design at dConstruct last week. I had lots of fun and learned a lot as well - I know, it makes me sound as though I was a participant, not running the show! Funny how that works! (Hopefully the people who came along [...]

So, recently we’ve been talking about Qualitative Research and how it’s not so scientific, but that ain’t bad.
We identified three ways that you *might* make Qualitative Research more scientific and have been pulling those approaches apart. They are to:

Use a relatively large sample size (which we destroyed here)
Ensure that your test environment doesn’t change (which [...]

So, earlier we were talking about whether you can or should attempt to make qualitative research more scientific, and that there are three ways you might go about doing this, being to:

Use a relatively large sample size (deconstructed in Part One)

Ensure that your test environment doesn’t change (which we’ll talk about now)
Ensure that your test [...]

If you’re into qualitative research at all, it wouldn’t have taken long before you had someone ask you about the statistical significance of your research and how you could back your findings with such a small sample size, or to find others out there trying to make qualitative research look more scientific by trying to [...]