User Experience design and usability can be a really challenging thing to explain. What makes it even more difficult is that everyone seems to have their own interpretation of it. Invariably the word “design” trips most everyone up, often making i…
Following hot on the heels of empathy, my next class was designed to dig a bit into guerrilla user research techniques. Personally, I’m a big fan of hallway tests or interviews, but usually before I even go there, I like to do a bit of investigati…
This class project is one of my favorites; one that I wished I did back in grad school. But back then, all we got was this one anecdote which was always trotted out when a professor wanted to talk about user studies: an ethnographer who donned the…
I’ll admit: I rarely use QR codes. But today I thought I’d try out Flight Centre’s because it just sounded so… convenient. I like to travel and I like sales and I like getting notifications by email (yes, I’m old school that way). One zap and I’…
It’s been an extremely busy week so this one will be short and sweet. While I didn’t conduct usability testing on the site myself, I did do a fairly thorough analysis of the NOWBC site and looked at the entry experience, as well as the critical pa…
This week, my students spent planning their usability tests for our ‘client’, NOWBC, a local co-op that has an online farmer’s market. The idea is to discover what are the main stumbling blocks or areas of confusion in signing up and using the ser…
Yesterday, we spent part of the class discussing the field trips we took last week to “offline” (you know you’re a geek when you always want to refer to this as IRL) bricks and mortar grocers. Having spent a couple of hours taking a good hard look…
So the first class project I created focuses on user research & usability testing. I had originally scoped out Home Depot as our first ‘client’ to conduct usability testing on — in particular, I was curious how the online/offline (clicks vs brick…
I’ve been thinking about my dream User Experience book/course/lecture that I would teach for many years now. I’d like to believe that I’ve channeled all of my regrets from my own educational experiences into something positive. Basically in the co…
I’m fairly forgiving toward UI in general. I’m a realist — I get that for many companies user experience design just doesn’t float to the top (even if it that saddens me).But sometimes, it is just so breathtakingly obvious that the user experienc…
