Collecting: links
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How to embrace inclusivity in UX research
🔗️ Kelly Erickson gives some useful tips on how to make our research more inclusive.
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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.
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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.
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Meet the Robowaiter APIs Serving Us Data
🔗️ @mappletons’s beautifully illustrated introduction to APIs.
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The role of research in Design Systems
🔗️ A decent overview of design systems with a slight hintof how research could play it’s part.
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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!
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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.
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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!
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Are your Anchor Links Accessible?
🔗️ @ambrwlsn90’s great explanation of her approach to adding accessible anchor links to her website.
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Twitter a11y score
🔗️ @DavidLibeau’s Twitter app to check the accessibility of your tweets based on alt text added to the image you share.
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Is Progressive Enhancement Dead Yet?
🔗️ @heydonworks’ second instalment of his highly entertaining videos on accessibility and web technologies.
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Indiekit
🔗️ @paulrobertlloyd’s very interesting looking IndieWeb server project. Looking forward to trying this out.
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Sci-Fi Blindness
🔗️ Peter White explores science fiction's enduring interest in blindness.
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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.
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TBM 17/53: Measuring to Learn vs. Measuring to Conform
🔗️ @johncutlefish on the intent and boundaries of measurement.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Webbed Briefs
🔗️ @heydonworks’ snack-sized videos about the web and its technologies.
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WCAG for designers
🔗️ @gerireid’s designer’s accessibility checklist for working toward WCAG standards.
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The A - Z of alternative words
🔗️ A guide of alternative words to use to improve reading comprehension.
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S.C.U.L.P.T. – Accessibility Guidance
🔗️ Helen Wilson’s accessibility guidance for working with text, images and tables.
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Readability Guidelines
🔗️ @ContentDesignLN’s fantastic guide for better writing and words.
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Pandoc: a universal document converter
🔗️ John MacFarlane’s general markup converter, great for converting accessible documents.
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noscript.it
🔗️ @gnyman nice little bookmarklet for running websites without javascript.
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Microsoft accessibility video training
🔗️ Microsoft’s video course for making documents more accessible in Microsoft products.
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Designing accessible services
🔗️ @ukhomeoffice’s guidelines on designing accessible services and links to a set of accessibility posters.
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Alt-Text as Poetry
🔗️ Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan’s collaboration project exploring writing alt-text creatively.
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A11Y Websites
🔗️ @calum_ryan’s showcase of accessible websites.
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Colour blindness: a thread
🔗️ @LoanReads enlightening Twitter thread of visualising colour blindness.
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Tips for Accessibility-Aware Research
🔗️ W3C RDWG (Research and Development Working Group) outlines for considering accessibility in research.
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Accessibility in UX research
🔗️ Michelle Parfitt gives 10 valuable tips when testing for accessibility.
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Asking Better Questions
🔗️ @johncutlefish shares his approach for asking better questions to understand what to measure.
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Closing the feedback loop
🔗️ @LindsayBoylan’s insight into creating an all singing all dancing research repository using EnjoyHQ.
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Why UX Research Repositories Fail
🔗️ Sofia Quintero’s critical gaze at why research repositories fail and how we can avoid such pitfalls.
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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.
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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.
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Sensemaking & structure: how Airtable changed my practice
🔗️ @wonkyearrings tips on note-taking during research sessions using Airtable.
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Managing Research Insights at a Portfolio Level
🔗️ @wonkyearrings shares some really interesting tips on building a portfolio level research repository in Airtable.
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Jobs to be done personas
🔗️ @productherapist’s advice in creating personas supported by JTBD research.
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Testing content and user research
🔗️ Jonathan Richardson outlines some techniques for researching and testing content.
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Jobs To Be Done
🔗️ An excerpt from @jimkalbach latest book The Jobs To Be Done Playbook.
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A simple technique for evaluating content
🔗️ Pete Gale’s brilliant highlighter technique for testing content.
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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.
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Undemocratising User Research
🔗️ @SaswatiSM’s argument against democratised research.
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Scaling UX Research: how to train an army of (non)researchers
🔗️ @egomezspain’s argument for training non-researchers and tips for doing so.
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My work life as a Global UX Researcher at Uber
🔗️ @egomezspain describes his life as a global UX researcher.
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Democratization is our Job
🔗️ @beh_zod describes the importance of democratising research.
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Content in the product design process — articulating our role
🔗️ @Minette_78 walks us through the content design process.
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More, Broader, Faster: A Brief Intro to Effective Remote Research
🔗️ @productherapist’s tips for better remote research.
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Dont Jump My Tips For Interpreting User Research
🔗️ @keithemmerson’s gives some great advice about observing research sessions.
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Analyse a research session
🔗️ An outline of analysing research sessions from the gov.uk Service Manual.
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Virtual Meetings: How to reduce cultural anxiety
🔗️ @drjcurran’s anthropologist view of remote meetings and 6 tips for reducing anxiety of remote meetings.
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Conducting an effective stakeholder interview
🔗️ @bpusability shares buckets of really useful questions for stakeholder interviews. A really fantastic post!
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Using content strategy to present your research findings
🔗️ @Minette_78 gives some great advice for presenting research findings from a content strategy perspective.
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The ultimate guide to Google Analytics for UX designers
🔗️ @aliceemmwalker gives some great advice for using Google Analytics for UX designers.
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The most important moments to talk to users
🔗️ Jordan Jackson outlines the two most important moments to speak to customers.
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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.
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How to use Google Analytics for UX Research
🔗️ @kristi_bee has written a great primer for using Google Analytics for UX research.
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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.
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How to Conduct a Cognitive Walkthrough
🔗️ IXD Foundation overview of the cognitive walkthrough method.
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Cognitive Walkthroughs
🔗️ Brad Dalrymple gives an overview of the cognitive walkthrough method and shares a useful test spreadsheet template.
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How to Do a UX Review
🔗️ @mrjoe gives a great introduction to the expert review method in this 24 Ways article.
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An Introduction to Modern Product Discovery Practices
🔗️ @ttorres’s product discovery keynote from Productized Conference 2016.
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Getting your priorities right
🔗️ @chrishow rounds up some useful prioritisation techniques for making difficult decisions.
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Five dysfunctions of ‘democratised’ research. Part 4 – Quantitative fallacies
🔗️ @leisa’s fourth post about scaling research, this addressing the risks of quantitative research.
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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.
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UX Research Incentive Calculator
🔗️ Useful tool by @ethnio for calculating research incentive costs.
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Using behavioural economics default effect for positive impact.
🔗️ @_ted_hunt’s great example of using behavioural economics default effect for positive impact.
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Combining quantitative and qualitative data
🔗️ Some really interesting thinking by @steph_marsh81 about qual+quant and where research findings should exist.
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Business Origami
🔗️ Rachel Jones gives an in-depth overview of the Business Origami research method.
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Business Origami: A Method For Service Design
🔗️ Chenghan Ke shares some useful tips for conducting a Business Origami collabirtive research session.
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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.
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Themes Don’t Just Emerge - Coding the Qualitative Data
🔗️ Erika Yi’s quick guide to qualitative coding for research analysis.
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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.
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Critique your shortcut to better designs
🔗️ @chrishow shares some inspiring advice for better design outcomes by running design critiques.
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Ethical Maturity in User Research
🔗️ @maria_rosala from Nielsen Norman Group writes about ethical maturity in user research and their assessment.
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The Hypothesis Prioritization Canvas
🔗️ @jboogie’s 2x matrix for prioritising hypotheses.
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Metrics Mountain - a realistic visualisation of any customer lifecycle metrics
🔗️ @jboogie makes a suggested replacement for the funnel metaphor. Introducing the Metrics Mountain.
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10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design
🔗️ @jakobnielsen’s 10 usability heuristics guidelines for interaction design.
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Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility
🔗️ Stanford’s 10 guidelines for boosting a website‘s credibility.
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Principles Of Interaction Design
🔗️ @asktog’s thorough revised and expanded first principles of interaction design.
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On Expertise, Mistakes, and Baking Bread
🔗️ A nice little post form @jseiden about making and recognising mistakes, leaning and bread making.
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Aaker Brand Personality Dimension
🔗️ An interesting introduction into Aaker’s five dimensions of brand personality.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Goals Don’t Replace Systems - And Vice Versa
🔗️ @DariusForoux talks about the differences of goals and systems and how they support each other.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Service mapping to make friends and influence stakeholders
🔗️ Louise Nicholas and Katherine Wastell of Co-op explain the benefits of service mapping with stakeholders.
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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.
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How to Measure Emotion
🔗️ @dannyhearn_me’s introduction to measuring emotion using the BERT technique.
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Getting all emotional with BERT
🔗️ A good introduction to the BERT (bipolar emotional response testing) technique.
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Making Research Count by Cyd Harrell
🔗️ @adactio shares a live blogging of @cyd-harrell’s Event Apart talk Making Research Count.
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Shadowing & dogfooding… or how we research for Monzo’s internal product
🔗️ @thea_aj lifts the lid on how Monzo researches for internal products.
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Creating a collaborative and evidenced content style guide by Lizzie Bruce
🔗️ @CakeContent announces a very exciting collaborative evidence-based content style guide. Amazing work! 👏️
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Here’s what to do when user research doesn’t fit in a sprint
🔗️ @jseiden’s thoughts on Agile and research.
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Cognitive Mapping in User Research
🔗️ @segibb’s thorough explanation applying the cognitive mapping method for user research.
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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.
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Building a Research Repo when you don’t know how
🔗️ @hugofroesUX shares some valuable lessons from building a research library.
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Colour Review - What you need to know about colors & accessibility
🔗️ A very nice colour contrast AA and AAA accessibility checker.
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The journalism user research relationship
🔗️ @greggcorp outlines the relationships between journalism and user research.
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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.
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Running in Circles
🔗️ @rjs sheds light on the uphill struggles and responsibilities of protecting the agile team.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Empathy in Design
🔗️ @ClaraGaggero from @special_proj on the pillar of Design Thinking - empathy.
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Designing features using Job Stories
🔗️ Maish Nichani offers some great examples and advice for designs using the JTBD framework.
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Designing features using Job Stories
🔗️ Alan Klement explaining how JTBD job stories can help during the feature design phase. Bonus links to comments highlights!
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What Really Matters - Focusing on Top Tasks
🔗️ My notes on researching Gerry McGovern’s Top Tasks article for an upcoming project
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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
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Interviewing Users
🔗️ Jakob Nielsen’s advice on interviews.
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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.
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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”.
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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.
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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.
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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”.
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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.
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The Lean Event — Day One
🔗️ Matt Jukes’ live blog notes from day one The Lean Event, Brighton, UK.
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The Art of Storytelling
🔗️ Julie Zhuo talks of the power of story telling, timing and understanding people.
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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.
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The User’s Journey
🔗️ Donna Lichaw describes the process of story mapping to discover the “why” of user behaviour and validate design hypothesis.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Color vs. Contrast
🔗️ Piotr Koczorowski explains effectiveness of contrasts in UI design.
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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.
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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.
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Lowering the barriers
🔗️ Charlotte Spencer gives advice on lowing the entry point for your open source projects.
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Eric Meyer on content blockers
🔗️ Eric Meyer’s honest take on the content blocking introduced in iOS9 and the positive opportunities it presents.
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Indie Web Camp Homepage
🔗️ This is a great resource for starting to take the next steps to owning your own data.