UX newsletter — April 2019Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. Message from the EditorThere are too many fake news stories in circulation to use April Fools' Day as an excuse to write another. So this month, rather than write a story about something that doesn't exist, I decided to write an article about something that doesn't exist, but should. I've named it the Procrustes Award for Bad UX. I hope you find it useful. — David Travis 'And the award goes to…' How to avoid winning a Procrustes Award for Bad UXWe're familiar with awarding prizes for excellence, from the Oscars to The International Design Awards. But what if we started giving prizes to shame bad examples of design? Enter the Procrustes Awards. Read the article in full: 'And the award goes to…' How to avoid winning a Procrustes Award for Bad UX From our archives: Evangelising user researchUser experience professionals often complain that design teams fail to take action on the findings from user research. But researchers need to shoulder some of the blame: research reports are often too wordy, arrive too late and fail to engage teams with the data. Dressed-down personas, customer journey maps, photo-ethnographies, affinity diagramming, screenshot forensics and hallway evangelism provide 6 alternatives. Read the article in full: Evangelising user research. What we’re readingSome interesting UX-related articles that got our attention over the last month:
Like these? Want more? View our posts on Twitter or Facebook. Upcoming UX training coursesUser Research Fundamentals, June 3-7 2019, London.A 5-day immersion seminar that shows you how Government Digital Services (GDS) plan and carry out user research within Government. You'll practice interviewing and contextual research, carry out usability testing, explore the bigger picture of assisted digital and discover how to plan user research on agile projects. View the full syllabus: User Research Fundamentals. Foundation Certificate in User Experience, July 9-11 2019, London.In this fun and hands-on training course, you'll practice all the key areas of UX — from interviewing your users through to prototyping and usability testing your designs — while you prepare for and take the BCS Foundation Certificate exam. View the full syllabus: Foundation Certificate in User Experience. UX quotation of the month"Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment… Companies that don't continue to experiment, companies that don't embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence." — Jeff Bezos, founder & CEO, Amazon. Did I mention I've published a book?It's titled Think Like a UX Researcher. Grab your copy here. Hungry for more?Want to receive your own copy of this newsletter?Join our community of people interested in user experience. Sent monthly. No spam. |