The EchoUser Newsletter — April 2024
Spring is… springing 🌧️🌞❄️
April showers bring May flowers, and maybe a late season snowstorm for fun. Happy April and welcome to the April version of the EchoUser newsletter. Today, we cover the following topics:
- Our 2024 Offsite, the first in-person one in more than 4 years
- 5 things we love
- The value of an old-fashioned usability test
- Interesting articles we’ve come across recently
Cheers!
CEO, EchoUser
EchoUser 2024 Offsite 🚀
What’s it like to work with someone closely for more than two years, completely online, and then meet that person for the first time in real life? Welcome to EchoUser’s 2024 offsite!
We just held our first in-person offsite since 2019. As a fully remote team, getting together for this offsite was more impactful than most. We got together in EchoUser’s hometown of San Francisco. Here’s a short little video of some of the highlights.
Read more about how our offsite went, here!
5 Things We Love 💚
Following the theme of getting to know each other, it’s always interesting to get a peek at the things that people really love to use. We canvassed our EchoUser team to see what’s keeping us interested and excited these days. From vests to Chicago and blueberry bagels to sporty pants, take a look at the five things we love to use, and why.
The value of an old-fashioned usability test 🥼
I recently conducted a usability test, in person with the test participant, with a dedicated room for the participant and a dedicated room for the product team to observe. It’s been a long time since I’ve run one of these and it got me thinking how easy it is to take for granted just how powerful a basic usability test is, not just for identifying usability issues, but for the impact it can have on a product team. I took some time to write up my thoughts in more detail here.
The Power of a Simple Usability Test.
Articles of note 🗞️
We share recent articles we’ve come across that we’ve found interesting…
The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI. Maggie Appleton
This article is actually over a year old, but it’s one of the best ones I’ve read around the topic of generative AI and its potential impact on what we all could experience in our interactions with the web in the future. Much more than your typical superficially informed hot take, I feel like I learned something from reading it.
The next couple of articles are commentaries on the state of the UX profession. There’s been a lot of soul searching going on these days, so there’s no shortage of opinion out there. However, the authors of these two articles are long time UX practitioners who are speaking from a substantial base of real-world experience, so they make for interesting reading.
The big design freak-out: A generation of design leaders grapple with their future, Robert Fabricant.
Robert Fabricant posits that a generation of design leadership has essentially failed.
Designing Women: How outdated ideas about femininity hurt design leaders of all genders and stifle business innovation, Katrina Alcorn
Instead of blaming design leaders, Katrina Alcorn asserts that outdated ideas about femininity have hurt design leaders.
More about us
Learn more about us at echouser.com including our past work and our blog. Want to contact us? Email us at hello@echouser.com.
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