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Collecting:

I collect links, thoughts and lists.

• Lists, scribbles and doodles.

  🤔️ I’ve not carried a notebook on me for years. I blame Covid-19 and the promise of digital knowledge management tools. Anyway, I recently broke the seal on my cache of [Analog.is](https://analog.is/) notebooks and took a few on my trip to Japan. I now don’t go anywhere without one and a 0.5 Pilot Drawing Pen. I love the experimental approach to notebook design by the folks at [Optional.is](https://optional.is/required/2023/05/03/business-card-notebooks/)

• First day, first commute.

  🤔️ My first day back into the Clearleft office was made all the more easier with an almost-off-road commute through the South Downs. Splendid!

• Introducing Eleventy to an eleven-year-old

  🤔️ Spent a couple of hours blowing the mind of an eleven-year-old with Eleventy layout and partial includes. Lots of ear-to-ear grins and excited squeaks. Kudos to @andy@bell.bz for making his Eleventy From Scratch resource available for free. Granted it’s a few years old but has explained the few concepts I need really well. Looking forward to porting my own site to Eleventy over the Christmas break.

• Goodbye engagement vanity metrics

  🤔️ One thing I’m really enjoying about the Mastodon reading experience is the concealment of a post’s engagement vanity metrics. With the number of Boosts, Favourites, Bookmarks and to some degree replies all hidden at the feed level, I find I focus more on the content.

• Teaching how to fish

  🤔️ I spent some of yesterday afternoon teaching my son some very basic principles of HTML and CSS. The delight on his face when he figured out where he was going wrong and fixed a few bugs by himself.

• How to embrace inclusivity in UX research

  🔗️ Kelly Erickson gives some useful tips on how to make our research more inclusive.

• Recipeasly promised to ‘fix’ online recipes. After critics called it theft, the site shut down.

  🔗️ @timcarman’s very thought provoking article about innovation, copyright, and cultural stories of underrepresented groups.

  Read my notes

• Writing UX Research Objectives — Using S.M.A.R.T. Goals Method

  🔗️ Edward Beebe-Tron introduces the benefit of setting research objectives using the S.M.A.R.T. goals method.

• Meet the Robowaiter APIs Serving Us Data

  🔗️ @mappletons’s beautifully illustrated introduction to APIs.

• The role of research in Design Systems

  🔗️ A decent overview of design systems with a slight hintof how research could play it’s part.

• New book! Dr. Smartphone: An Ethnography of Mobile Phone Repair Shops.

  🔗️ An absolutely fascinating look at the the culture of mobile phone repair shops. I want this book!

• What is Accessibility?

  🔗️ The first of @HugoGiraudel’s 25 accessibility posts from their 2020 A11y Advent Calendar. This post offers a brief overview of what accessibility is.

• How to pick the right UX research method

  🔗️ Elisa Baliani shares her research cheat sheet for selecting the right research method and tips for better planning. Mixed methods FTW!

• Are your Anchor Links Accessible?

  🔗️ @ambrwlsn90’s great explanation of her approach to adding accessible anchor links to her website.

• Twitter a11y score

  🔗️ @DavidLibeau’s Twitter app to check the accessibility of your tweets based on alt text added to the image you share.

• Is Progressive Enhancement Dead Yet?

  🔗️ @heydonworks’ second instalment of his highly entertaining videos on accessibility and web technologies.

• Indiekit

  🔗️ @paulrobertlloyd’s very interesting looking IndieWeb server project. Looking forward to trying this out.

• Intersectional and diverse stories for children and young adults

  📝 A list of books, TV, films, comics suitable for children and young adults to introduce the concept of intersectionality and diversity.

• Sushi fillings and Japanese food recipes

  📝 A list of tried and tested sushi fillings and Japanese food recipes

• Sci-Fi Blindness

  🔗️ Peter White explores science fiction's enduring interest in blindness.

• Updating to the latest Plex build on a Raspberry Pi

  🔗️ I finally found a way to upgrade to the latest Plex build on a Raspberry Pi.

  Read my notes

• TBM 17/53: Measuring to Learn vs. Measuring to Conform

  🔗️ @johncutlefish on the intent and boundaries of measurement.

• In search of a simpler Twitter experience

  🤔️ Inspired by @craigmod’s tweet about using Twitter’s search to improve the experience I had a bit of a play myself.

• TBM 50/53: The Curse of Success Metrics

  🔗️ @johncutlefish shares his observations of why teams find success metrics challenging and how to help them make more impactful progress.

  Read my notes

• Setting up a Raspberry Pi as a bridged wireless access point

  🔗️ @Raspberry_Pi’s straightforward guide for getting wifi into those hard to reach places using a Pi as an access point.

  Read my notes

• A Comprehensive Guide to Accessible User Research: Part 2 – Recruitment and Preparation

  🔗️ @BrianGrellmann’s second blog post of a series about taking an inclusive approach to accessibility in design research.

  Read my notes

• A Comprehensive Guide to Accessible User Research: Part 1 – Project Planning

  🔗️ @BrianGrellmann’s first blog post of a series about taking an inclusive approach to accessibility in design research.

  Read my notes

• Webbed Briefs

  🔗️ @heydonworks’ snack-sized videos about the web and its technologies.

• WCAG for designers

  🔗️ @gerireid’s designer’s accessibility checklist for working toward WCAG standards.

• The A - Z of alternative words

  🔗️ A guide of alternative words to use to improve reading comprehension.

• S.C.U.L.P.T. – Accessibility Guidance

  🔗️ Helen Wilson’s accessibility guidance for working with text, images and tables.

• Readability Guidelines

  🔗️ @ContentDesignLN’s fantastic guide for better writing and words.

• Pandoc: a universal document converter

  🔗️ John MacFarlane’s general markup converter, great for converting accessible documents.

• noscript.it

  🔗️ @gnyman nice little bookmarklet for running websites without javascript.

• Microsoft accessibility video training

  🔗️ Microsoft’s video course for making documents more accessible in Microsoft products.

• Designing accessible services

  🔗️ @ukhomeoffice’s guidelines on designing accessible services and links to a set of accessibility posters.

• Alt-Text as Poetry

  🔗️ Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan’s collaboration project exploring writing alt-text creatively.

• A11Y Websites

  🔗️ @calum_ryan’s showcase of accessible websites.

• Colour blindness: a thread

  🔗️ @LoanReads enlightening Twitter thread of visualising colour blindness.

• Tips for Accessibility-Aware Research

  🔗️ W3C RDWG (Research and Development Working Group) outlines for considering accessibility in research.

• Accessibility in UX research

  🔗️ Michelle Parfitt gives 10 valuable tips when testing for accessibility.

• Asking Better Questions

  🔗️ @johncutlefish shares his approach for asking better questions to understand what to measure.

• Closing the feedback loop

  🔗️ @LindsayBoylan’s insight into creating an all singing all dancing research repository using EnjoyHQ.

• Why UX Research Repositories Fail

  🔗️ Sofia Quintero’s critical gaze at why research repositories fail and how we can avoid such pitfalls.

• Jobs To Be Done: One Key Idea About How To Build Products And Services In Post-Pandemic Times

  🔗️ @Sajal4mThen’s interesting take of the challenge and opportunity for small businesses in post-pandemic age through the lens of JTBD.

• The Power of Insights: A behind-the-scenes look at the new insights platform at Uber

  🔗️ Etienne Fang gives a thorough and inspired write up of Uber’s approach to sharing research insight.

• Sensemaking & structure: how Airtable changed my practice

  🔗️ @wonkyearrings tips on note-taking during research sessions using Airtable.

• Managing Research Insights at a Portfolio Level

  🔗️ @wonkyearrings shares some really interesting tips on building a portfolio level research repository in Airtable.

• Jobs to be done personas

  🔗️ @productherapist’s advice in creating personas supported by JTBD research.

• Testing content and user research

  🔗️ Jonathan Richardson outlines some techniques for researching and testing content.

• Jobs To Be Done

  🔗️ An excerpt from @jimkalbach latest book The Jobs To Be Done Playbook.

• A simple technique for evaluating content

  🔗️ Pete Gale’s brilliant highlighter technique for testing content.

• Zoompathy. Coming to a research project near you?

  🔗️ @bowmast on the importance of context in qualitative, the tradeoffs we incur with remote research and how to challenge them.

  Read my notes

• Undemocratising User Research

  🔗️ @SaswatiSM’s argument against democratised research.

  Read my notes

• Scaling UX Research: how to train an army of (non)researchers

  🔗️ @egomezspain’s argument for training non-researchers and tips for doing so.

• My work life as a Global UX Researcher at Uber

  🔗️ @egomezspain describes his life as a global UX researcher.

• Democratization is our Job

  🔗️ @beh_zod describes the importance of democratising research.

  Read my notes

• Content in the product design process — articulating our role

  🔗️ @Minette_78 walks us through the content design process.

• More, Broader, Faster: A Brief Intro to Effective Remote Research

  🔗️ @productherapist’s tips for better remote research.

  Read my notes

• Dont Jump My Tips For Interpreting User Research

  🔗️ @keithemmerson’s gives some great advice about observing research sessions.

  Read my notes

• Analyse a research session

  🔗️ An outline of analysing research sessions from the gov.uk Service Manual.

• Virtual Meetings: How to reduce cultural anxiety

  🔗️ @drjcurran’s anthropologist view of remote meetings and 6 tips for reducing anxiety of remote meetings.

• Conducting an effective stakeholder interview

  🔗️ @bpusability shares buckets of really useful questions for stakeholder interviews. A really fantastic post!

• Using content strategy to present your research findings

  🔗️ @Minette_78 gives some great advice for presenting research findings from a content strategy perspective.

• The ultimate guide to Google Analytics for UX designers

  🔗️ @aliceemmwalker gives some great advice for using Google Analytics for UX designers.

• The most important moments to talk to users

  🔗️ Jordan Jackson outlines the two most important moments to speak to customers.

• Questions that I have found useful

  🔗️ Jordan Jackson’s inspired post with a huge list of incredibly useful research questions to use with specific research methods.

• How to use Google Analytics for UX Research

  🔗️ @kristi_bee has written a great primer for using Google Analytics for UX research.

• The 4 questions to ask in a cognitive walkthrough

  🔗️ Dr. David Travis outlines the 4 questions to ask during a cognitive walkthrough and gives some useful real-world relatable examples.

• How to Conduct a Cognitive Walkthrough

  🔗️ IXD Foundation overview of the cognitive walkthrough method.

  Read my notes

• Cognitive Walkthroughs

  🔗️ Brad Dalrymple gives an overview of the cognitive walkthrough method and shares a useful test spreadsheet template.

  Read my notes

• How to Do a UX Review

  🔗️ @mrjoe gives a great introduction to the expert review method in this 24 Ways article.

• An Introduction to Modern Product Discovery Practices

  🔗️ @ttorres’s product discovery keynote from Productized Conference 2016.

  Read my notes

• Getting your priorities right

  🔗️ @chrishow rounds up some useful prioritisation techniques for making difficult decisions.

• Five dysfunctions of ‘democratised’ research. Part 4 – Quantitative fallacies

  🔗️ @leisa’s fourth post about scaling research, this addressing the risks of quantitative research.

• What big corporates often get wrong about Service Design

  🔗️ Fantastic article by Douglas M. Smith about the 5 mistakes big corps make with Service Design.

• UX Research Incentive Calculator

  🔗️ Useful tool by @ethnio for calculating research incentive costs.

• Using behavioural economics default effect for positive impact.

  🔗️ @_ted_hunt’s great example of using behavioural economics default effect for positive impact.

• Combining quantitative and qualitative data

  🔗️ Some really interesting thinking by @steph_marsh81 about qual+quant and where research findings should exist.

• Business Origami

  🔗️ Rachel Jones gives an in-depth overview of the Business Origami research method.

• Business Origami: A Method For Service Design

  🔗️ Chenghan Ke shares some useful tips for conducting a Business Origami collabirtive research session.

• UX and CX: Same Language; Different Dialects

  🔗️ @jmspool’s take on the origin stories of UX and CX, and how shifting from a role to skill mindset alongside a mixed methods approach can offer more impact.

  Read my notes

• Themes Don’t Just Emerge - Coding the Qualitative Data

  🔗️ Erika Yi’s quick guide to qualitative coding for research analysis.

• It’s Never a Good Time to Do Research

  🔗️ @mulegirl’s take on the excuses we make not to run a research study and accepting the discomfort of asking questions.

• Critique your shortcut to better designs

  🔗️ @chrishow shares some inspiring advice for better design outcomes by running design critiques.

  Read my notes

• Ethical Maturity in User Research

  🔗️ @maria_rosala from Nielsen Norman Group writes about ethical maturity in user research and their assessment.

• The Hypothesis Prioritization Canvas

  🔗️ @jboogie’s 2x matrix for prioritising hypotheses.

  Read my notes

• Metrics Mountain - a realistic visualisation of any customer lifecycle metrics

  🔗️ @jboogie makes a suggested replacement for the funnel metaphor. Introducing the Metrics Mountain.

• 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design

  🔗️ @jakobnielsen’s 10 usability heuristics guidelines for interaction design.

• Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility

  🔗️ Stanford’s 10 guidelines for boosting a website‘s credibility.

• Principles Of Interaction Design

  🔗️ @asktog’s thorough revised and expanded first principles of interaction design.

• On Expertise, Mistakes, and Baking Bread

  🔗️ A nice little post form @jseiden about making and recognising mistakes, leaning and bread making.

• Aaker Brand Personality Dimension

  🔗️ An interesting introduction into Aaker’s five dimensions of brand personality.

• Reconciling the Differences in Our Data: A Mixed-Methods Research Story

  🔗️ Caryn Kieszling and Sera Mirchandani show us how we can avoid conflict and provide better recommendations when we unite qual and quant with a mixed-methods approach.

• Five dysfunctions of ‘democratised’ research. Part 3 – Research as a weapon

  🔗️ The third part in @leisa’s blog post series about scaling research. This post covering when team relationships go sour and research is ‘weaponised’.

• Elevate your research objectives - Write better research objectives to get better insights

  🔗️ @productherapist explains how to refine your research objectives to gain better results from your research.

• User research plans - who cares and how to write one

  🔗️ @productherapist’s solid advice, and template, for writing a research plan for more focused research and more actionable results.

• Five dysfunctions of ‘democratised’ research. Part 2 – Researching in our silos leads to false positives

  🔗️ @leisa’s second post about the common dysfunctions about ‘democratised’ research, this focusing on researching in silos, the query effect and false positives.

• Goals Don’t Replace Systems - And Vice Versa

  🔗️ @DariusForoux talks about the differences of goals and systems and how they support each other.

• The Horizon of Inquiry – To find time for research, don’t fight the flow—fit into it

  🔗️ @mulegirl shares a model of fitting research into the flow of continuous work.

• Five dysfunctions of ‘democratised’ research. Part 1 – Speed trumps validity

  🔗️ @leisa’s calls out the tradeoffs of compromising speed with validity, the first of five research dysfunctions.

• From insights to actions. Or, what should we do with this research?

  🔗️ @leisa explains what steps need to be taken to make research actionable, what questions need to be asked and who needs to be involved.

• Service mapping to make friends and influence stakeholders

  🔗️ Louise Nicholas and Katherine Wastell of Co-op explain the benefits of service mapping with stakeholders.

• We Got Homebrew Covered

  🤔️ An evening of beer @eleven_ty and music covers

• We need to stop talking about usability testing…

  🔗️ Christina Li of @melonxdesign waxes lyrical about asking the right questions and choosing the right research method.

• How to Measure Emotion

  🔗️ @dannyhearn_me’s introduction to measuring emotion using the BERT technique.

• Getting all emotional with BERT

  🔗️ A good introduction to the BERT (bipolar emotional response testing) technique.

• Making Research Count by Cyd Harrell

  🔗️ @adactio shares a live blogging of @cyd-harrell’s Event Apart talk Making Research Count.

• Shadowing & dogfooding… or how we research for Monzo’s internal product

  🔗️ @thea_aj lifts the lid on how Monzo researches for internal products.

• Creating a collaborative and evidenced content style guide by Lizzie Bruce

  🔗️ @CakeContent announces a very exciting collaborative evidence-based content style guide. Amazing work! 👏️

• Here’s what to do when user research doesn’t fit in a sprint

  🔗️ @jseiden’s thoughts on Agile and research.

• Cognitive Mapping in User Research

  🔗️ @segibb’s thorough explanation applying the cognitive mapping method for user research.

• Why UX Research should not be a solo show

  🔗️ Probably the best explanation of Research Ops I’ve read yet, I particularly like @saritarink’s actor and production team comparison.

• Building a Research Repo when you don’t know how

  🔗️ @hugofroesUX shares some valuable lessons from building a research library.

• Homebrew Webify Top

  🤔️ A long overdue, refreshing Homebrew to counter the current scorching heat

• Colour Review - What you need to know about colors & accessibility

  🔗️ A very nice colour contrast AA and AAA accessibility checker.

• Omni-cancel

  🤔️ I’ve just been told about of a great experience using a taxi service telephone channel

• Homebrew Tags

  🤔️ Twisting off the lid of my website and adding tags at Homebrew Website Club

• The journalism user research relationship

  🔗️ @greggcorp outlines the relationships between journalism and user research.

• Home-brew

  🤔️ Home-brewing - Adding @clagnut’s hyphenation and other offline enhancements

• Offline Homebrewing

  🤔️ Going Offline - Adventures online/offline at the rebooted Homebrew Website Club @clearleft

• JTBD Analytics - What jobs are site visitors trying to get done?

  🔗️ An interesting method of surfacing jobs from website analytics data such as search logs.

• Running in Circles

  🔗️ @rjs sheds light on the uphill struggles and responsibilities of protecting the agile team.

• Job Stories — Best Friend of Sales

  🔗️ @sboyd47 suggests how job stories could benefit the entire organisation but more specifically sales by offering an extended emotional shared-language.

• How to Stop UX Research being a Blocker

  🔗️ @ben_ralph has some interesting ideas on how research can co-exist within agile teams with foundational and directional research.

• Usability Heuristics for Bots

  🔗️ A great read by @thekevinscott on applying Jakob Nielsen’s usability heuristics to chatbot design. Includes a handful of examples too.

• Empathy in Design

  🔗️ @ClaraGaggero from @special_proj on the pillar of Design Thinking - empathy.

• Designing features using Job Stories

  🔗️ Maish Nichani offers some great examples and advice for designs using the JTBD framework.

  Read my notes

• Designing features using Job Stories

  🔗️ Alan Klement explaining how JTBD job stories can help during the feature design phase. Bonus links to comments highlights!

  Read my notes

• Homebrewing Again

  🤔️ Homebrewing again - Attempting an automated POSSE webmention via brid.gy at tonight’s Homebrew Website Club

• What Really Matters - Focusing on Top Tasks

  🔗️ My notes on researching Gerry McGovern’s Top Tasks article for an upcoming project

  Read my notes

• You’re the designer, isn’t this your job?

  🤔️ You’re the designer, isn’t this your job? - Thoughts on collaborative UX + Dev sessions

• Smartphone vs Dumbphone - where’s the middle ground?

  🤔️ Is going “full dumbphone” really necessary? Here’s my thoughts on dumbing down the smartphone

• Taking time to form a writing habit

  🤔️ I’m taking time out to write in hopes of forming a healthier habit

• Shared understanding - Keeping your assumptions in check

  🤔️ Build better shared understanding by leading from a macro to micro level

• HTML Prototyping 101 - Offline Mode

  🤔️ HTML Prototyping 101 - Build with the assumption you’ll be demoing them without an internet connection

• 5 Steps to Create Good User Interview Questions By @Metacole — A Comprehensive Guide

  🔗️ 5 Steps to Create Good User Interview Questions By @Metacole — A Comprehensive Guide

  Read my notes

• Interviewing Users

  🔗️ Jakob Nielsen’s advice on interviews.

  Read my notes

• UX Design and Service Design are Growing Ever Closer

  🔗️ Andy Budd’s take on the similarities and inevitable merging of UX Design and Service Design.

• Service or servitude — are you a superhero or a slave?

  🔗️ An inspirational post by Carlos from Happy Startup School discussing the idea of “service vs servitude”.

• Why I can’t convince executives to invest in UX (and neither can you)

  🔗️ Jared Spool explains there is no silver bullet to gaining executive UX buy-in. Instead, a tactful discovery of executive convictions that could leverage a sympathy for UX.

• User personas - don’t let them die…

  🔗️ Anna Miedzianowska’s advice on keeping personas alive, improving cross-team buy-in, and including them into your daily process.

• A designer’s guide to Parkinson’s Law of Triviality

  🔗️ Daniel Burka from Google Ventures shares techniques of how to manage misaligned team focus and prevent “bikeshedding”.

• What makes a good question

  🔗️ Part of Chris How’s three-parter blog post ’How to get better answers from asking better questions’, this post walks you through 8 top tips for forming better questions for customer and stakeholder interviews, and surveys.

• The Lean Event — Day One

  🔗️ Matt Jukes’ live blog notes from day one The Lean Event, Brighton, UK.

• The Art of Storytelling

  🔗️ Julie Zhuo talks of the power of story telling, timing and understanding people.

• Unicorns don’t exist. Generalists do.

  🔗️ Emmet Connolly from Intercom explains the merits of generalist and specialist designers and who and when to add to your team.

• The User’s Journey

  🔗️ Donna Lichaw describes the process of story mapping to discover the “why” of user behaviour and validate design hypothesis.

• Five reasons why design sprints are the best way to kick off a new product initiative

  🔗️ Joshua Porter explains the value of research, divergent and convergent design, prototyping and usability testing over an intensive five day design sprint.

• 8 common dysfunctions of design teams—and what to do about them

  🔗️ John Zeratsky highlights common dysfunctional practices within design teams and how to go about changing the team culture to build better products.

• Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS

  🔗️ After battling for roughly two hours with z-index on a responsive navigation layout this list of CSSWG mistakes makes me feel slightly better.

• Color vs. Contrast

  🔗️ Piotr Koczorowski explains effectiveness of contrasts in UI design.

• Outcomes, not outputs

  🔗️ Ben Sauer on leaving solutions assumptions and baggage at the door, addressing the change not the thing, and suggests how we as designers can stay focused. There’s also a mountain bike analogy, so it ticks all the boxes.

• The 5 UI States

  🔗️ Scott Hurff breaks down the five UI states and how, when designed cohesively, it can lead to better user interfaces and experiences.

• Lowering the barriers

  🔗️ Charlotte Spencer gives advice on lowing the entry point for your open source projects.

• Eric Meyer on content blockers

  🔗️ Eric Meyer’s honest take on the content blocking introduced in iOS9 and the positive opportunities it presents.

• Jekyll collections are hard

  🤔️ After muddling along for a few hours with Jekyll collections, I now have a home for my thoughts and links. Now to #POSSE #indieweb

• Indie Web Camp Homepage

  🔗️ This is a great resource for starting to take the next steps to owning your own data.