Things I've Written

Consumer Decisions in a Social World
In a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review that focused on branding, David Edelman articulates how consumers’ engagement with brands is evolving with the proliferation of social media and other digital channels.
Coaching Experience Designers
Coaching designers can take many forms—formal check-ins or progress reports, structured design reviews or critique sessions, or simply informal conversations and collaborations. No matter what your style, consider the following guidelines when interacting with others as a coach.
Preparing for User Research Interviews
Interviewing is an artful skill that is at the core of a wide variety of research methods in user-centered design...

5 Ways to Be Persuasive in Your UX Work
In your work as a UX professional, do you ever find that you need to convince people that the team should follow a user-centered design process? Do you need to convince stakeholders they should do user research? To be successful as a UX professional, you need to know how to be persuasive.
Prioritizing Web Projects
As a company with an existing web offering, there are likely a large number of potential changes or feature additions...
A Visual Approach to Competitive Reviews
A common activity at the outset of many design projects is a competitive review. As a designer, when you encounter a design problem, it’s a natural instinct to...
Card Sorting
If your company designed an information rich website such as an intranet or content portal a few years ago, chances...

Extending Card Sorting
When developing hierarchies for informationrich websites, designers and usability researchers often turn to card sorting...
Design Research Methods for Experience Design
There is a trend among some in the UX community to take the U out of UX and refer to our discipline simply as...

Laddering: Interview Technique
A number of my previous Research That Works columns on UXmatters have focused on semi-structured user research...

Developing Communities of Practice
If you do user research, chances are good that you conduct a fair number of user interviews. Our training tells us to...
The Repertory Grid
If you do user research, chances are good that you conduct a fair number of user interviews. Our training tells us to...
Rapid Desirability Testing
In the design process we follow at my company, Mad*Pow Media Solutions, once we have defined the conceptual...