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User research is about surfacing behavioral insights to design products. Build your knowledge of user research, including methods for conducting user interviews and ethics
Supported by the Open Technology Fund, our team provided human-centered design and research support for Mobile Surveillance Monitor, a new, public online platform that tracks and maps mobile surveillance threats.
Understanding the different types of users helped us design a better onboarding flow for Snikket, an open source decentralized messaging platform.
Design is all about making decisions. From a rebrand to a feature specification, from a new product to a new logo, every design change presents you with a fresh set of decisions. Personas are a way to help with those decisions.
While bigger companies have entire departments that do product design and market research, it can be difficult for smaller, distributed teams on a budget to get user feedback. We compiled a session guide to test your app with small groups, ideal for quick feedback at conferences and meetups.
In this installment of our series on resources for field research, we discuss the participant's bill of rights. Additional resources include screeners and model releases for photography. Why Consent Matters Field research such as interviews and observations are an important part of Human-Centered Design. As important as learning about first-person, lived experiences is to the design process, the act of participating in an interview can feel awkward. There is an inherent power dynamic that puts researchers in a dominant position; for all that participants know, once they share a personal story, researchers are free to use it as they please.
This post is part of a series explaining our publicly available resources for user research. The previous installment covered how to write screeners to recruit participants. This week, we discuss how to get model releases to share photos from user studies. One approach among manyAt Simply Secure, we strive to balance study participants' privacy with building empathy in an audience of developers, policymakers, and designers by sharing study photos and stories.
A screener is a questionnaire that helps researchers recruit the most appropriate participants for their user study research. Here is an example we used for our mobile messaging study in NYC. Blue Ridge Labs handled the recruiting. Most of this screener's questions are a standard part of how they work with potential participants. Our questions, in red, focus on messaging and attitudes towards privacy. Additional questions about VPN use, email, and getting online were for our Fellow Gus Andrews's research.