Category: What is UX

I hear a lot about how UX can improve “user engagement”. It sounds great – you want people to use something, so it needs to engage them. But the more we use it, the less clearly we define it. Usability Geek talks about gamification as the secret to engagement. Meanwhile, UX Collective has 7 rules…

In 2011, Matt Cutts gave a TED talk called: Try Something New for 30 Days. In it, he speaks to a way of setting and achieving goals: doing something new for 30 days. But the catch is that at the end of 30 days, Cutts moves on to something new. When I think of my…

When I first heard about Critical User Journeys (CUJ) I found myself asking: aren’t all user journeys critical? But in a way, the CUJ is like a minimum viable product marker for users: what are the journeys they most need? Personally, one of my favorite things about working in UX is watching old ideas come…

In early 2013 I explored storytelling in UX in my first ever conference talk: What’s in a Story. At the time I talked about educational content. I found it interesting that so many people seemed to think shorter articles were better, when in my experience the length had little to do with engagement and optimization….

When I read Automating Inequality I thought about the many misconceptions of AI (artificial intelligence). Many companies market AI, machine learning, and digital in general as “magic”. But that’s not a helpful way to think about work. When we think of it as “magic” we forget that it’s nuanced. More importantly, we forget that we…

How do you make a digital tool better? Start with the manual work. Digital tools and algorithms can make manual processes better, but only if our manual processes improve as well. All algorithms inherit human intentions. And without conscious effort, algorithms inherit human bias. Is tech moving too fast? There are two seemingly opposing statements…

Why is personalization invisible? I believe it has something to do with how humans think of themselves. People tend to think of themselves (ourselves) as in control. This is particularly true when things are going well. For example: When someone has a successful business they rarely acknowledge how much of success is based on luck….

Every organization knows what they do. Some know how they do it, and a very few know why they do it – not to make money, but why you get out of bed in the morning, and why anyone should care. Simon Sinek calls this the Golden Circle. I think Simon Sinek’s golden circle is…