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 [...]

I’ve been thinking on this a little bit lately. I’m just about to make some more changes at work, and I have to admit, for a while there I was toying with becoming an ‘innie’.
There is something quite seductive about having the access to resources that innies have that outies never really get. Especially if [...]

For many years, as the groundswell towards Mac has gathered pace, I’ve had to endure many of my colleagues scoffing at the fact that I continue to use Visio when they’ve seen the light and made the move to Omnigraffle.
I got my first Mac in more than a decade last week, so I’ve left behind [...]

Personas seem to go in and out of fashion. Not long ago, people were advocating hyper-researched personas done in painstaking detail, these days designers seem more inclined to leave them out of the process.
So, are personas actually useful or should we stop wasting time and ditch them?
I first came into contact with personas in an [...]

I was on a panel at the IA Summit over the weekend titled ‘where does IA fit in the design process‘. I was staking a case for Agile UCD, and these are the slides I used to outline my case in 5 minutes or less (Of course, you could talk about this topic for hours, [...]

Here’s a typical story.
A project is in its final phases when it gets to the part of the Gant chart that says ‘usability testing’, and so they do.
People come in and are asked to perform tasks, and so they do, with greater or lesser degrees of difficulty. And yet, something else is wrong.
It’s not so much that they *can’t* [...]