Category Archives: research

The Googling of the future that you do with your friends

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 me, I’m quite curious [...]

User testing on Mechanical Turk [how-to]

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 [...]

How Usability Studies are Like a French Meal [Comic]

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, [...]

Using remote research to inform social interaction design (SxD)

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 in a [...]

Putting the craft in design thinking

This was originally posted on Unstructure on January 30 2010, as a guest author.
Is design thinking really that hard? There is obviously a growing acceptance of the notion behind design thinking as the previous essays and comments pointed out. But it remains that there is no formula for design thinking, and because of that, design [...]