User Experience newsletter — January 2020Happy New Year! Towards the end of 2019, I found it increasingly hard to find the time to write long-form articles on UX. This may have been due to the inevitable hangover of writing a book. It's certainly not due to running out of things to say because I've found myself instead drawn to creating weekly videos. Whatever the cause, my current plan for 2020 is to create video content on UX rather than written content. As always, let me know what you think. 5-minute videos on UX
Want me to answer a UX-related question in a future video? Just reply to this email with your question. Upcoming certification courseFoundation Certificate in User Experience, Jan 21–23 2020, London. This 3-day course covers the comprehensive syllabus for the BCS Foundation Certificate in User Experience. Things worth readingI enjoyed this article on (failing) to create value in a product or service. “You can’t just create value for the user: that’s a charity. You also can’t just create value for your company: that’s a scam. Your goal is to set up some kind of positive-sum exchange, where everyone benefits, including you.” (Thanks to Marco Kramer). There’s an interesting discussion about the existence (or otherwise) of UX/UI Designers on LinkedIn, stimulated by an article by Jared Spool. Here’s the discussion and here’s the original article. Non-psychologists: If you’re curious about how psychologists do experiments and draw conclusions, this podcast from Shankar Vedantam on NPR’s Hidden Brain is a good listen. If you are a psychologist, it’s a good refresher on memory. I love a good paradox. David Hamill reminds us of one in this Twitter thread: Organisations who do lots of user research are not the same as those who have a strong user focus. Perhaps because I celebrate a milestone birthday in 2020, this article resonated with me: In the UK, people aged 65 and over will take up over half the new jobs created by 2030. Even if many of those jobs are unskilled and based on zero-hours contracts, it will still have significant implications for job design, accessibility and UX. Based on a Tweet from Vicky Teinaki (@vickytnz) I’ve started reading The Phoenix Project. It describes itself as a novel but it’s essentially a long-form Harvard Business Review case study on taking control of IT projects (“DevOps”). The case study contains so many catastrophes and captures office politics so well that I’ve found it compulsive reading. I sometimes find that clients are reluctant to pay for participant recruitment and say that they want to do it themselves, using existing customer lists. In my experience, you need to keep a close eye on the process to make sure the research doesn’t go south. This article by Jim Ross on The Perils of Client Recruiting should help. I’ve been a user of the notetaking app Evernote for many years. But within 15 minutes of using Notion, I jumped ship and bought an annual subscription. I love the way Notion encourages me to organise everything: it’s like a wiki for your life. I’m currently setting up a template to organise the planning, analysis and reporting of user research data. This is an affiliate link (if you use it you’ll save $10 on a subscription and I get $5 off my next renewal). If you don’t like affiliate links, do a Google search for “Notion notetaking”. These Instagram vertoramas (vertical panoramas inside buildings) re-create the user experience of being inside cathedrals and other buildings with vaulted ceilings. Thanks for reading. If you find this newsletter useful and want to support it, forward it to someone who’d like it or, even better, buy them a copy of Think Like a UX Researcher. If you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time, you can subscribe here. David Travis. |