It is difficult to find a phrase that exactly describes my work and the way I approach it. I’ve started to talk about human-centred approaches. This post explains what I mean by that. Read full article
1 commentHave 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.
I really like the evidence-based advice in this article. It shows how the pathway to true happiness is to, in a way, forget about yourself.
Instead of thinking about the myriad negative feelings you want to avoid and the myriad things you can buy or do in service of that, think about a single organising principle that is highly effective at generating positive feelings across the board: Shift your focus outward.
I often feel uneasy about how much advice from self-help gurus encourages people to focus inwards on themselves. Humans naturally crave social interaction and feeling part of a wider purpose, beyond narrow self-interest.
This article offers practical suggestions for how you can find that, to help you feel better through what’s going to be a tough winter.
Strengthening the foundations under the Overton Window without moving it
Should you refuse to argue with someone who is very wrong, in case it accidentally lends their argument some legitimacy? Katja Grace argues that this could be damaging.
In short: we don’t want to give the new generation the best sincere arguments against V [a terrible view], because that would be admitting that a reasonable person might believe V. Which seems to get in the way of the claim that V is very, very bad. Which is not only a true claim, but an important thing to claim, because it discourages people from believing V.
But we actually know that a reasonable person might believe V, if they don’t have access to society’s best collective thoughts on it. Because we have a whole history of this happening almost all of the time.
Thought-provoking, especially in the context of my recent posts about not feeding the trolls.
Satisfying fundamental human needs
How UX designers can ensure they “satisfy our intrinsic needs”.
There are lots of really interesting examples that I hadn’t seen before. If nothing else, it’s a pretty eye-opening insight into why Costco is designed the way it is.
The origins and evolution of thinking aloud
Some interesting perspective on thinking aloud in psychology and other social science, and how that can inform whether or not it’s a good idea to ask people to think aloud in usability tests.
I thought I had joined the many people who don't use their degrees in their careers. But I have come to realise that my degree in social science has been absolutely vital to my web design work. Read full article
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