Most of the time, the designs I test with users, could have benefited from a UX review at an earlier stage. — Somewhere in the evolution of user-centred design (what we called it before UX), the humble UX review seems to have fallen out of favour. I get the best results with my clients when I regularly review designs in addition to carrying out user research. In this post I’m going to…

Short videos on single subjects — I’m constantly disappointed by the lack of practical advice being shared by most of the so-called design leaders on social media. A consistent thread I’m also hearing from people entering UX, is how much bad advice exists on the internet. It’s very hard for new entrants to tell the good…

or how user-centricity fades in growing tech companies — The most user-centric companies I’ve worked with, tend to be those where the leaders take the time to observe user research and engage with other forms of customer feedback. Yes it helps them to take more informed decisions, but it also has an influence on the attitude of the rest…

Observing behaviour is how you build the instinct to understand it. — There’s a school of thought in UX research where usability testing is a practice which should be mostly left to product teams to do for themselves, freeing UX researchers up to concentrate on ‘more important’ work. For some researchers this is so they can more in-context observation instead, which is…

I have kinda stumbled into doing a series of usability testing tips on LinkedIn. I did two and they were quite popular, so now I’m compelled to keep going. I’m going to use this post to collate them all by linking to each of the posts on LinkedIn. “What is…

Many startups are hooked on guerrilla research methods which aren’t healthy for them in the medium-long term. — Guerrilla usability tests are the staple diet of the tech startup. They grab people wherever they can and stick their product in front of those people to get feedback. Startups should often move quickly on from this and do a bit more deliberate research with more specific types of people…

A mindset which confines innovation efforts to failed proof-of-concepts, crappy chatbots and Alexa skills nobody needs. — As we begin each new year, we are subjected to the routine predictions about what the year, and indeed decade, will bring in terms of technology. While it’s always advisable to keep an eye on developing trends, I believe that blindly developing for those trends is a distraction for many…

When something in your analytics stands out as being odd, then it might be worth investigating further. — Belgian cycle racing The retired American cycle racer Joe Parkin, wrote a book titled A Dog in a Hat, about his time racing in Belgian as a professional cyclist. The book’s title comes from a phrase used to refer to a rider who was obviously doping. The rider who would normally be struggling…

You don’t need to prove the benefit of every design decision you take. But you’re not a psychic design super-hero, so use evidence where it exists. — I was recently reminded of one of the many arguments which seem to polarise design discussion online. The reminder came in the form of a Medium post titled Data-driven design is killing our instincts. In the post, the author argues that an over-reliance on data in favour of design instinct…