AI Etiquette: How do you speak to your voice assistant? To get the best out of home assistants at the moment, you need to have a patient understanding of the weaknesses and ambiguities of speech recognition. I like to call this AI etiquette. …

How to make your home assistant play intro music for you, keeping you cheerful and annoying your housemates. When I walk into my living room, my Google Home plays a randomised hype music track, like the theme from Rocky, as if I was a boxer or skinny wrestler. This is…

Some thoughts on the Assistant metaphor. I have a Google Home in my bedroom. In the mornings, I use it for an alarm, to play music, check the weather, listen to news and sometimes check my calendar. …

Extract immediate value from your user-research video footage by following these steps. As a design researcher in a fast-moving business environment it is hard to balance scientific rigour with the need for answers. …

A live list of examples of good/bad design research questions. I wrote this in response to requests for actionable examples to support my general dos and don’ts on interviewing customers for product research. I’ll add to it whenever I come across new questions. …

I’m currently writing guidelines for my product team to do their own interviews with customers. These are things that work for me. Please do comment or disagree if you do things differently. Before: prepare exquisitely Do: Your homework on the participant to prepare: LinkedIn, Google etc. Prepare a list of internal questions to answer …

You may have seen my #xmasriddles on Twitter or Instagram, here is a special Christmas Day emoji quiz. Guess the festive words with your family – a great alternative to arguing! Update: Answers now revealed. SONGS 1 👁🔪🍟🍟🍟 I saw three ships 2 🔇🌃 silent night 3 🍽🌎 feed the world 4 🏌🏡🎄 driving home for christmas 5 💎🎄💎 rocking around the christmas tree 6 ⛱💣 oh tannenbaum 7 🎅🏼👶🏼 santa baby 8 👼🏼🐒🗽 fairytale of new york 9 🎅🏼➡➡🏙 Santa Claus is coming to town FOOD 10 💩🔑 turkey 11 🚣🏻🐻♜🔩🔩 roasted chestnuts 12 🎅🏽💩🛎 christmas pudding 13 🍐✂️ parsnips 14 🍃🕵 mince pie 15 ◽8⃣🐖 🐖 ◽8⃣ pigs in blankets 16 🚕👶🏼➡👴🏻 cabbage 17 🍞☝🏾🙎🏾 bread sauce 18 😂8⃣📈 chocolate log MISC 19 👁🚴🏻 icicle 20 🧀🐐🐐 holy ghost 21 🏅💩 winter 22 👸 🍑 queen’s speech 23 😒 🐜 humbug 24 🌌🐴🐝4⃣🎅🏼 nightmare before christmas 25 🎅🏼🐝🐄🐄🐄 santa’s beard 26 ⛔👑 stocking

These are some learnings that I found useful from Pree Kolari, Senior Director of Design Strategy and Research at eBay, in his interview on the excellent Dollars to Donuts podcast, made by Steve Portigal. …

Last week was the first (of many) meet-ups for Fintech for Humans. This here’s a quick overview of what went down. Fintech for Humans is a project run by Alice Newton, head of product at WorldRemit, Jonny Burch lead designer at Osper and me, lead researcher at DueDil. Our aim…