User Research

"I hate Facebook, Facebook is stupid." This quip came from a 17 year old who was responding to the question of whether he thought it was good to be 'Facebook official' or not.

There is talk of innovation everywhere. Governments and business are talking about ways to close the innovation gap, to stimulate the economy and growth through innovation. Within this talk there is a great deal of focus on development: developing new apps, developing new technologies, developing a culture of innovation.

 Bring up the idea of using Focus Groups with most User Researchers and they will look at you as if you said you’ve been abducted by aliens. The skepticism is not totally unwarranted. Undergrad Psychology books are filled with examples of how focus groups are full of social dynamics that can produce misleading results. What researchers seem to forget is that all methods have their biases.

It seems like there is a constant debate amongst smartphone users. You've got the touchscreen enthusiasts who pride themselves on the sleek, minimalist design of a touch-only device. Then you've got the two-thumb texting machines that will not touch a phone that doesn't have a physical keyboard.

A couple of weeks ago Justin and I went to the Corporate Affiliates Day at University of Washington’s Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) program.

Yesterday was April Fool’s Day. And what I thought was a totally crazy joke, turned out to have a lot of interest.

For the gag I forwarded an old message to the building list serve to my staff but changed the subject and content of the message.

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Last week a client asked me that very question, “What are the best labels to use on this website?” ADGi had been engaged to complete an assessment of the company’s current website's information architecture.

In 2008 I led a large intranet implementation project where the senior sponsors demanded that there be a governance plan developed. But when asked what governance meant, they were mostly interested in making sure that content was updated and that there be some form of oversight to ensure that business units were using the same platform for sharing information.

One of the main attributes of the design work we at ADGi do (and when I say design I mean interaction design and information architecture, not so much visual design) is that all of it is evidence-based. That is, all of it, and I really mean all of it, every interaction, every node in the site map, is driven out of user research and expert analysis.