Monthly Archives: February 2010

The Googling of the future that you do with your friends

17 Feb 2010 – 20:58

I don’t actually know what the title of this article is, but Google translate tells me that this: “Het Googlen van de toekomst doe je met je vrienden” translates to this: “The Googling of the future that you do with your friends”. If anyone out there speaks Dutch and wants to provide a translation for [...]

By brynn | Posted in research | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

User testing on Mechanical Turk [how-to]

11 Feb 2010 – 10:44

This is a pretty high-level summary (e.g., not that detailed) of how I create and run a new survey on Mechanical Turk. Since people have lots of different ways of using Mechanical Turk, this how-to may or may not be for you. I’ve also noticed that nearly every survey or questionnaire I put on Mechanical [...]

By brynn | Posted in research | Tagged , , , | Comments (8)

Morning commute [Comic]

8 Feb 2010 – 10:30

This is a short comic based on my experience a few weeks back when I got stuck in bad traffic on my way to a meeting with a friend at Google. I decided to drive 280 South from San Francisco and then cut across the peninsula to reach Google (much closer to 101). I figured [...]

By brynn | Posted in comics, personal | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

How Usability Studies are Like a French Meal [Comic]

8 Feb 2010 – 10:24

It occurred to me the other day that usability studies were like a fine, french meal when I decided to insert a mini-task within a longer user study. This mini-task reminded me of the “amuse-bouche” in french meals, like the bite of sorbet or other spoonful of citrus goodiness to cleanse the palate. After that, [...]

By brynn | Posted in comics, personal, research | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Using remote research to inform social interaction design (SxD)

4 Feb 2010 – 9:02

This was originally posted on the Bolt|Peters blog on February 2, 2010, as a guest author. What is social interaction design? Social interaction design (SxD) is the practice of designing for person-to-person interactions mediated by a computer interface, going beyond pure usability and human-computer interaction. Even fairly solitary experiences like editing a Wikipedia page occur [...]

By brynn | Posted in research, social, sxd | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)