Linknote — — 58 words

Social science — User experience — User research

Breakfast briefing — Behavioural science: Approaches to improve user experience — User Vision

Join me for a virtual breakfast session where you will learn about the links between behavioural science and user experience. We will also introduce some behavioural science frameworks and models you can adopt to improve your user research and design work.

It takes place online on Tuesday 7 March at 8:30am.

Update: Slides for this session are now available:

Linknote — — 110 words

Economics — Social science — User experience

Work:

Nudge in user experience — Website and Communications Blog

Over the summer my user experience team at the University of Edinburgh had the wonderful opportunity to work with a Behavioural Insights (Nudge) Intern. There are lots of parallels between behavioural science and human-centred approaches. Nudge models give us the opportunity to bring an extra level of formality to our approaches.

Working with a behavioural science specialist has brought things full circle for me. My first association with the University of Edinburgh was when I studied economics here for my undergraduate degree.

And it really is full circle, because this was my last blog post as an employee of the University of Edinburgh. I’ll publish more about that news shortly.

Linknote — — 144 words

User experience — User research

Work:

How to avoid common mistakes in user engagement — Website and Communications Blog

Have you ever participated in a user engagement session designed for you to share your views, but felt that you weren’t properly included, or that your views wouldn’t be acted on? Fed up with bad surveys and poorly planned focus groups?

Most of us want to engage with our users and stakeholders. We all want to make sure our users have a voice in projects that will affect them. But the approach you take can have a major effect on the success or failure of your engagement.

There are some basic truths about human behaviour that we know from psychology and other social sciences. But in many projects, these basic truths tend to be ignored.

Read this post on my team’s blog for tips on how to avoid the pitfalls of poorly planned user engagement, and how to make user research effective.