Strategy: Experience Strategy

Testing social media is difficult. We are not testing micro interactions, but macro, or global, behaviors. These can be extremely hard to observe—either by using qualitative methods to assess the commentary of individuals or groups or by tracking clicks. When testing social media, we are assessing social influence and motivation, which are much more elusive.

Understanding these types of behaviors won’t let you determine things like the perfect placement of your shopping basket icon. However, it can be invaluable when determining the right timing for providing choices such as content or action buttons. The monitoring of macro behaviors is quantitative in nature, and the data represents broad trends—what people do en masse, not individually. Nevertheless, it is the sum of many people’s behavior that is important rather than the behavior of individuals. Studying societal behaviors requires a different way of thinking—macro thinking—rather than the micro thinking that is characteristic of studying the behaviors of individuals. Read More

Who is doing the research work to recruit, observe, and understand the perspectives of users who, while they need mainstream technology solutions, also want to fulfill their basic survival, health, and safety needs? Users that societal systems have marginalized—whose voices have mostly been locked out or remain unrecognized?

Those of us who identify as members of such marginalized groups are more likely to consider the voice of the voiceless in our work. We, the authors of this article, grew up with and live around these voiceless people. In fact, they are our relatives and friends. As Black psychologists and researchers who are working in the field of User Experience, we feel compelled to share our experiences with you. Read More

I enjoy writing for UXmatters because it gives me the opportunity to explore topics that are of interest to me through the lens of experience design. I love researching a topic to learn more about it and connecting it to service design. It also gives me the opportunity to reflect on my own work and find themes, principles, or approaches that might be beneficial to others in the UX community.

When you work as a consultant, your clients look to you as the expert. They want you to guide them, show them what they should do, and help them to see how they should approach problems and decisions. As I quickly approach the milestone of two decades in my career providing experience-design consulting and client services, I find myself becoming nostalgic, reflecting on all those client head nods and even vehement client head shakes that I’ve experienced. Thus, I thought it would be valuable to the broader UX community for me to outline six of the top pieces of advice I’ve found myself repeating to clients over the years. Read More