Did an article at https://blog.handrailux.com/sell-your-boss-on-a-research-repository/ on selling your boss on a Research Repository. It starts off like: A research repository is a single place to keep all your user research. At Handrail, we not only store research. We also give people valuable tools for planning research, collecting data, performing analysis, and surfacing insights. While most people doing research clearly see the value in a repository, selling upstream can be a challenge. There are always competing priorities within organizations for budgets and other resources. It can be hard to compete with those that have more visibility to leadership and influence over budgets. But it can definitely be done! -Charles Edge If…
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Handrail: Bringing On New Vendors
I wrote an article on bringing on new Vendors on the HandrailUX.com blog. It starts off like… You had a need. You looked around, and there were a few software vendors that satisfied that need. You got pricing. And you got your idea funded. Now what? The answer is, it depends. Many smaller companies just throw a credit card number into a web form and boom goes the dynamite. But as organizations scale, small changes we make have a substantial ripple across the entire organization. To see more, check out:
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Export Airtable Grids to CSV
I have to say that when I first saw Airtable I thought, oh look – Excel online. It’s a little more than that and it’s been kinda’ cool to watch Airtable mature. The thing I like about Airtable is that a lot of software – in fact most software, is a database, logic that puts data into the database and takes things out of the database, and then actions based on the data. If we’re interacting with operating system APIs, then that database might be in registry hives (Windows) or defaults domains (Mac). We like to overcomplicate what software does in our brains, but that’s the gist. And a lot…
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Summarize UX Research In A Paragraph
I recently had a fairly large amount of work to do, summarizing UX Research findings into “a paragraph” and that project really got me thinking about trying to be more prescriptive about what a paragraph actually is. Consistency is important when making it easier for the consumers of our research to review our findings. Summarizing content allows people to drill down into just the information they’re looking for by providing a quick overview to an interview or study. Consistency doesn’t mean we can’t writing those summaries in an engaging and easy-to-read paragraph, just that consumers of the content get an experience that doesn’t take away from the actual content. Before…
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Batch Process Sentiment Analysis for UX Research Studies
I added the option to run sentiment analysis on csv files exported from a UX Research repository like Handrail to the lightweight sentiment analysis tool I worked on recently. That’s available at https://github.com/krypted/lightweightsentiment. This makes it pretty simple to pull in a csv and then add a column and supply a sentiment score for each row of the csv. It’s written to be generic and heavily uses python’s nltk. Make sure to install python3 before running it (e.g. brew install python3 with homebrew). Once you have python3 installed, download the files from https://github.com/krypted/lightweightsentiment into a directory (e.g. on your desktop or in a place you like to keep such things).…
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A Big Old List Of User Experience and Research Ops Conferences, Sites, Blogs, Podcasts, and User Groups to Check out in 2020
UX Conferences Conferences make for a great place for a community to meet in person. Slack makes for a great place to interface with a community. A list of UX and UX Research Conferences include the following: Rosenfeld World IA Day FRONT UX Brighton CanUX UX Live UX Strat Strive: The UX Research Conference QRCA UX Hong Kong UX Thailand UX New Zealand #gamesUR US User Research London Information Architecture Conference X4: The Experience Management Summit Interaction Latin America UX Designers Camp GOOD (Reach Network) Radical Research Summit epicpeople.org interaction19 ConveyUX CHI UXPA People Nerds UXinsight: “Looking Ahead” Design Research And someone just started a list of conferences here that’s…
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Using Inter-Reliability Rates in UX Research
We’ve all conducted excellent research only to have it thrown to the side when other people in our organization choose to just do whatever they were already planning to do. Executives, product managers, project managers, developers, and even UX Researchers (in other words all the humans) simply get dug into a position and unwilling to accept a point of view contrary to that position. One common objection we hear when presenting research are that a researcher introduced bias in the way a question was asked, or the tone of the researcher impacted the response, or even that researchers use different techniques. These same objections were once used to keep from…
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Creating A Repository For Your UX Research and Research Ops Findings
User research is a field that studies user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation, analyzing tasks, and getting feedback. The goal is to improve usability using experimental and observational research to guide how a product is built and the design that is used in the product and the development priorities. This might be through observation, running experiments, interviews, etc. The research work should be infused into all aspects of the product lifecycle. This allows for rapid prototyping, which then allows organizations to focus on building things customers want and doing so in the way customers need them done to be pertinent. When done right, this reduces the timeline to go to…