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Is Ethnography Possible without Field Research? Here’s what to do if you can’t visit your target users You’ve finally got approval to do B2B field research, and you want to study future customers as well as current ones. But when you try to visit your target users—IT staffers, customer support people, purchasing agents, product managers—their […]

360° Review of Remote UX As a global business leader, IBM is committed to serve its users around the world. Traditionally, the process of design ideation and user research often relied on face-to-face communication with our end-users. However, with a worldwide user and practitioner population, face to face collaboration is not always logistically practical. With […]

Developers in the Mist – Bringing Technology Teams Into the Field for Contextual Research to Build Empathy and Get Developers Thinking About the User First Do you ever ask yourself “Why doesn’t my technology team care more about the user?” Despite numerous presentations, invitations to user sessions, video clips, and other activities, researchers often fail […]

Becoming a Storyteller for the Design Process: Telling the Customer’s Stories The customer story is not just a description of the series of thoughts and actions that make up the buying process. Hearing what individual customers have to say about their lives and experiences can help to provide a realistic context for the product. It […]

The NCredible Framework: A Transparent Approach to Aligning and Designing Research Studies You’re ready to embark on a qualitative research study. Your team has the chance to investigate people’s behaviors, and you find yourself receiving questions from all directions. The questions sometimes feel haphazard, opportunistic, and misplaced – and put the credibility of research output […]

How we (sort of) made UX and agile work – A case study I have not heard of anybody who managed to make agile and UX work perfectly. Many companies nowadays work agile, and UXers struggle to keep up. In this talk I will discuss our agile process, how we try to make it work, […]

Practical Ethnographic Methods The best way to understand how your users behave and live is to actually visit them in their homes or workplaces. Ethnographic research, or Contextual Inquiries can seem overwhelming, but the principles are quite simple–it’s being a humble observer in a user’s personal space. Course participants will learn all about ethnographic research […]

Roll up your sleeves & get dirty in the data: workshops to maximize the impact of research insights Do you worry that your rich research insights are falling short of their full impact because busy stakeholders don’t fully digest them? Are accelerated timelines rendering detailed research reports less useful? Maybe there’s a better way than […]

Evaluating Complex Systems: Strategies for Testing Systems You Can’t Understand Are you working with extremely advanced system, or highly trained and experienced users? In these situations, it can be impossible to fully understand the users’ goals, tasks, and strategies in the time available. Since this understanding is an important component of most usability testing, it […]

Experience Streams in Cross-Channel Service Design: Leveraging Stats and Insights Surveys, interviews, analytics, user behaviour: the data keeps rolling in, from several sources and across products, and it becomes increasingly difficult to create a unified holistic perspective of what your users are actually about and how to tap into their needs directly. Combining quantitative and qualitative […]