Duncan Stephen

Linknote — 16 February 2018 — 77 words

Human-centred approaches — User experience

A useful overview of how you can apply principles from ethnography when designing. You are unlikely to be able to use a fully ethnographic approach. But that doesn’t mean you can’t incorporate elements of it.

Our view is that, if we liken traditional ethnography to a prize heavyweight boxer, then design ethnography is more akin to a street fighter. It doesn’t follow all of the rules but it gets the job done.

Linknote — 15 February 2018 — 107 words

Media

Ed Yong: I spent two years trying to fix the gender imbalance in my stories

…I looked back at the pieces that I had published in 2016 thus far. Across all 23 of them, 24 percent of the quoted sources were women. And of those stories, 35 percent featured no female voices at all. That surprised me. I knew it wasn’t going to be 50 percent, but I didn’t think it would be that low, either. I knew that I care about equality, so I deluded myself into thinking that I wasn’t part of the problem. I assumed that my passive concern would be enough. Passive concern never is.

Linknote — 14 February 2018 — 64 words

Business — User experience

The power of ‘so that?’

A lot of UX and business process related work is about uncovering the true motivations behind a behaviour, not just accepting what people say at face value.

I like this idea of ‘so that?’. It is a bit like the [five whys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys), another technique to help you get to the root cause.

Linknote — 13 February 2018 — 33 words

Media — User experience — User research

Level up your user interviews: lessons from the master, Louis Theroux

How following Louis Theroux’s techniques can improve your interviews as a UX researcher.

An entertaining post with some good advice as well.

Linknote — 12 February 2018 — 71 words

Digital

I’m having a ‘digital transformation’ right now

This is slightly inflammatory, but contains a lot of truth.

I was particularly struck by this point:

You will also find lots of high-level pieces about why ‘Digital Transformation’ matters — but very little in the way of relevant, reference-able case studies and practical advice about how to do it.

Although I would give mention to the case studies outlined in the New Reality.

Linknote — 7 February 2018 — 49 words

Business — Economics — Technology

Why Microsoft Office is a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush Saga

> Computers can certainly continue the process of specialisation, parcelling out jobs into repetitive chunks, but fundamentally they are general purpose devices, and by running software such as Microsoft Office they are turning many of us into generalists.

Linknote — 6 February 2018 — 147 words

Technology — Web

Google memory loss

This is interesting. It appears as though Google is losing older documents (such as 10-year-old blog posts) from its index.

I’m in two minds about this.

On the one hand, Google has long been something other than a mere web search engine, and rightly so. They want to get you relevant answers to your query. And old blog posts will rarely be the answers to many people’s queries.

But on the other hand, someone ought to be indexing the web. And if Google can’t (or don’t want to), who can?

My mental model of the Web is as a permanent, long-lived store of humanity’s intellectual heritage. For this to be useful, it needs to be indexed, just like a library. Google apparently doesn’t share that view.

Linknote — 5 February 2018 — 33 words

User experience — User research

Five user research rules of thumb

A useful article, not just for the rules of thumb, but also for generally provoking a reminder of what the job of a user research really involves.

Linknote — 4 February 2018 — 94 words

Technology — Web

Mosaic’s birthday: 25 years of the modern web

It feels like the world wide web has had more 25th birthdays than I’ve had hot dinners.

This article marks the 25th anniversary of the Mosaic web browser. You may not have heard for it, and I certainly never used it — it was before my time.

But Mosaic was one of the first graphical browsers, and one of the first to enable people to view images within pages. The makers of Mosaic went on to create Netscape Navigator, which in turn became the basis for Firefox.

Linknote — 2 February 2018 — 148 words

Technology

Why you should check email less often, and how to do it

Why do we check our email on average 18 times a hour, when most of us don’t receive anything like that many emails? Tim Harford suggests ways we can decrease our addiction to checking our email, and explains how checking it frequently makes our habit worse.

The psychologist BF Skinner once found himself running out of food pellets for one of his projects, which like many of his experiments involved rats pushing levers to receive rewards. To eke out his supply of pellets, Skinner restricted their release: rats would get no more than one pellet a minute, no matter how often they tapped the lever. Rather than discouraging the rats, this intermittent reinforcement soon had them hooked. These days, we’re the rats, the computer is our Skinner Box, and email is our intermittently released food pellet.