Duncan Stephen

Article — 7 July 2018 — 40 words

Day out at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

We really enjoy visiting Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It’s a fabulous space, both outdoor and indoor. It’s large enough that you can’t comfortably see all of it in one visit, meaning every time you go you see something new.

Linknote — 6 July 2018 — 40 words

User experience — User research

How to get better answers from asking better questions

Chris How’s tips on doing better interviews. This is essentially a text version of his session at UX Scotland, which I wrote about on the University of Edinburgh Website Programme blog.

Linknote — 3 July 2018 — 139 words

Web

Stylish browser extension steals all your internet history

If you use the Stylish browser extension, you ought to have a read of this. It might make you want to uninstall it immediately, as I did.

It appears that last year Stylish began collecting users’ data, including their full browser history, and even the contents of Google search results.

The above blog post explains exactly what is going on, and why it is a problem.

This is a great shame because Stylish provided a brilliant function enabling you to improve bad or unsuitable web designs very easily. I even created a style that improved the user interface for live timing on Formula1.com — which I still used up to last weekend, and has been installed by almost 500 others.

Not any more — I have uninstalled Stylish from my browser.

Linknote — 3 July 2018 — 135 words

Politics

Research: Women ask for raises as often as men, but are less likely to get them

The theory that women are paid less because they are less likely to ask for a pay rise appears to be nonsense.

The bottom line of our study is that women do “ask” just as often as men. They just don’t “get.”

Even we were surprised by the results. We had expected to find less asking by the females. Instead, we found that, holding background factors constant, women ask for a raise just as often as men, but men are more likely to be successful. Women who asked obtained a raise 15% of the time, while men obtained a pay increase 20% of the time. While that may sound like a modest difference, over a lifetime it really adds up.

Linknote — 2 July 2018 — 97 words

User experience

Work: The University of Edinburgh

UX Scotland 2018 — my day-by-day notes

Some more follow-up to the UX Scotland conference, which I have published over on the University of Edinburgh Website Programme blog.

I set myself the challenge of writing a summary of each session I attended at UX Scotland, as a way of forming my own thoughts on each topic, and to make sure to follow up on everything I wanted to.

This resulting blog post is long. But I am sharing this on the basis that others might find it useful and seek to learn more about these topics, as I did.

Linknote — 29 June 2018 — 124 words

Business — Digital

The rise of business bullshit — and how we can fight it

> The modern organisation is obsessive about collaboration and consultation – but encouraging everyone’s opinions on everything invites bullshit.
>
> Social media should have taught us by now that more opinions aren’t necessarily better…
>
> The same applies to work. More consultation = more bullshit.

This is so true. Increasingly, I find myself feeling exasperated if I’m asked the provide an opinion on something I have no evidence about. We are often pressurised into giving opinions — “you’re supposed to be the expert”.

Baseless opinions fly around left, right and centre in any workplace. The last thing the world needs is another middle class dude like me with yet another opinion.

Let’s find the evidence instead.

Article — 27 June 2018 — 739 words

UX psychology and other skeuomorphic job titles

Technology — User experience

Sometimes we have had to use metaphors from the physical world that help explain what’s going on in digital. But take things too far and it becomes counter-productive.

Linknote — 27 June 2018 — 129 words

Content design — Human-centred approaches

Every breath you take, every move they make counts for WA paramedics

Fascinating examples of how an ambulance service has experimented with their communications to save lives. A great example of how to use small experiments and tests to monitor improvements.

Asking “tell me what’s happened” instead of “tell me what happened” saves a staggering nine seconds, on average, per emergency call.

Studies have shown the first phrase prompts an immediate focus on the relevant detail, while the second prompts panicked callers on the line to tell meandering stories, full of unnecessary detail.

Saying “We’re going to do CPR,” instead of asking “Do you want to do CPR?” means a sharp rise in the number of bystanders agreeing to perform first aid while waiting for an ambulance.

Linknote — 25 June 2018 — 83 words

User experience

Work: The University of Edinburgh

UX Scotland 2018 write up

My colleagues and I have gathered together our thoughts on our highlights of the UX Scotland conference.

I am also in the process of writing up some further thoughts on most of the other sessions, which I will publish to the [University Website Programme blog](https://website-programme-blog.is.ed.ac.uk/) soon.

But in the meantime, find out about my top three sessions, and the things I intend to put into practice as a result of attending the conference.

Linknote — 24 June 2018 — 181 words

Technology

Artificial intelligence for more human interfaces

A very balanced assessment of the benefits of artificial intelligence — and its dangers. It’s lengthy, but well worth your time, containing lots of great examples of how artificial intelligence can be a force for good, but tempering that with plenty of warnings against using it badly.

Nowadays, we expect any photo search to be able to understand “dog” and find photos of dogs… And this is where Deep Learning worked its magic.

The problem is that only a few interfaces of well-known, big companies give this convenience. And that makes people wonder who owns information and where they know all these things from.

Unless we democratise this convenience and build interfaces everywhere that are that clever, we have a problem. Users will keep giving only a few players their information and in comparison less greedy systems will fall behind.

The other big worry I have is that this convenience is sold as “magic” and “under the hood” and not explained. There is a serious lack of transparency about what was needed to get there.