ux

We’ve been hard at work changing our conference curation process to create more diverse speaker rosters—for Enterprise UX 2018 (June 13-15, San Francisco), and soon for the second DesignOps Summit (New York City). Guess what? It all comes down to user research.

Jonathan Shariat in How Bad UX Killed Jenny tells a heartbreaking tale of a medical record software interface that led to the death of a little girl…

…the three nurses, with over 10 years experience, were too distracted trying to figure out the software they were using…

His call-to-arms needs to make it’s way back to universities that teach software design so that idealistic young students know there’s a fruitful career to be had saving people’s lives through better design!

I’ll be teaching Immersive field techniques: Interviewing and observing for user research, a full-day workshop at UX Australia in Brisbane, in August 29th.

Interviewing is undeniably one of the most valuable and commonly used user research tools. Yet sometimes we forget that it’s a skill we need to learn, because:

• It’s based on skills we think we have (talking or even listening)
• It’s not taught or reflected on
• People tend to ‘wing it’ rather than develop their skills

Without good interviewing skills, research results may be inaccurate or reveal nothing new, suggesting the wrong design or business responses, or they may miss the crucial nuance that points to innovative breakthrough opportunities.

In this day-long session, we’ll focus on the importance of rapport-building and listening and look at techniques for both. We will review different types of questions, and why you need to have a range of question types. This session will explore other contextual research methods that can be built on top of interviewing in a seamless way. We’ll try some practice exercises for improving your own interviewing skills. Through a homework exercise and a field trip during the workshop, we’ll also practice observation of users in an environment.

This workshop is an evolution of something I’ve been teaching for a number of years (and continue to refine). Over the past couple of years I’ve led forms of this session in Istanbul, Vancouver, Savannah, Toronto, Lisbon, Barcelona, Hong Kong, and San Francisco. Now it’s Australia’s turn.

I believe some of the conference workshops have already sold out, so if you might be going, please sign up soon! I look forward to seeing you there!

We’re in the midst of refining the “Experiences” chapter of the Service Design book right now and we have some questions for our potential readers. As we are being published by Rosenfeld Media can we assume that you all have a pretty good knowledge of User Experience design? If we are making comparisons and distinctions or if we are covering some methods used in SD that are common to UX, how much should we explain them? We don’t want to teach anyone’s grandmothers to suck eggs, or even to do UX. Or we can just point to the UX Zeitgeist.

If you are someone involved in UX, IxD, IA or another trendy acronym, what would you like to see in this section?