How and why to consider the larger context of product decisions — Over the past several years, some serious work has been done to define User Experience as a field. As with any good definition, part of the discussion has focused on what UX is not: UX is not UI UX is not Usability UX without Users is not UX UX is…

Sometimes there isn’t time for research… but that doesn’t mean there isn’t data. — Even in organizations with dedicated UX researchers, there is often not a lot of time for research up front ahead of product development. This can result in designers scrambling to create something great, without a lot of input on what is really most important to their users. In most cases…

Combining qualitative and quantitative approaches The goal of most design research is to understand a problem better, so that we can design a better solution. The specifics of the problem, and what we already know or don’t know about it, are different for each project. But if the problem is worth solving, there are always…

These are the steps (dialed up to 11): 1. Find a problem that needs to be solved. 2. Make sure that the problem is important, find out who it is important to, and determine who is affected by it (sometimes the same people, but not always). 3. Learn the ways that other people have tried to solve this…