Letters from the Equator

I had a free day to myself today, so I thought I’d laze around the internet looking for interesting stuff and ended up spending the whole day immersing myself with the insane amount of stuff that’s been posted on the interwebs about Interaction 11 in Boulder, Colorado. After 5 pages of sketchnotes, I’m still not [...]

This is a long overdue post that should have gone out a week ago, but I guess it’s better late than never. Why? I’ve been keen on improving my presentation skills (I hear it’s a good thing for UX designers), so I jumped at the chance to present when Lee McIvor announced LightingUX needed some [...]

The subject of design education, UX careers, and mentoring has been on my mind a lot lately. It wasn’t long ago that I was looking for UX job and I’ve learnt a lot in the process, not to mention the experience I’m gaining on the job right now. In addition, there’s been a lot of [...]

I was fortunate enough to get a ticket at the very first Design Jam today. It was put together as part of Mozilla Labs’ work to encourage ‘open design’, and runs in the spirit of developer ‘hack days‘, but mainly aimed at UX designers (the first of its kind?). I’m happy to say the event [...]

After two months of looking, I’ve finally found an opportunity to work in the user experience field as an Information Architect (my previous role was Lead Developer, although I did quite a lot of UX there as well as in the previous company). It was certainly the right combination of my previous skills and experience [...]

I gave a presentation a few weeks ago at the NordiCHI 2010 research conference, based on some workI did about a year ago about how people use images on the internet. It was a diary study involving nine participants and I sought out to understand the motivations behind their image use activities. Most of the [...]

A candidate student for UCL’s HCI programme emailed me to ask some questions about the course, so I’ve decided with his permission to put the Q&A here for the benefit of everyone else. If anyone wants to add anything, feel free to put it in the comments section. 1. What do you think about the [...]

It has been a long time since I’ve done a user interview. Months. I felt so out of touch, and I was desperate to get back into user research. When I finally succeeded in recruiting a participant a few days ago, I was elated. Okay, so it was someone I met on the London IA [...]

My very first attempt at incorporating a user-centered design approach in my software development project was, in many ways – an important start for me, career-wise. It’s because of that project that I am where I am now – I would certainly not have been accepted into the MSc, which subsequently opened a lot of [...]

Ethnography involves a lot more work than user experience design, because it involves deeper immersion, more personal commitment, a greater willingness to learn from one’s own observational failures, and the ability to work across cultural boundaries. This is only a small part of what user experience design attempts to accomplish, and depending on how you [...]