Leaner, more agile

This week, I’m attending a few days of training in agile software development, in an Innovel course titled Lean, Agile and Scrum for Project Managers and IT Leadership.
My first exposure to agile was in Desiree Sy’s 2005 presentation, Strategy and Tactics for Agile Design: A design case study, to the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) annual conference […]

Ethics of interaction design: influencing user choices

The more choices people have, the more likely they’ll choose something utilitarian over something hedonistic.

In an experiment by Aner Sela, Jonah Berger, and Wendy Liu, 20% of 121 participants chose low-fat ice cream when given a simple choice of two, but 37% chose low-fat ice cream when given a choice of ten. In this case, low-fat […]

Researching usability research

I’m conducting ethnographic research into how usability analysts regard usability research.
How will I conduct this research?
I’m conducting a form of community-based participatory research, so members of the community—the research subjects—will help me set the questions or lines of inquiry and will influence the research methods. This is appropriate since I’m researching people who research—people […]