You think you’re just like everyone else. You think your thoughts, opinions, values, and habits are just the same as other people. Psychology calls this the false consensus bias1 because we assume much more commonality than reality warrants. False consensus bias contributes to making bad decisions when we design software. Alan Cooper noted this type [...]
The age of cheap “like”-hunting needs to come to an end. It all started innocently enough with likes and tweets. Then in a few years, we suddenly ended up with governments scoring people and masses manipulated into meaningless activities to generate more ad revenue. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Now the time [...]
At the time of this writing, a search for UX design jobs on job finder Glassdoor reveals almost 20,000 open positions in the United States alone. By another source, the number is 24,000, with a 22% projected growth rate in the next ten years. Salaries vary between USD$60,000 to $127,000 annually, with the median salary [...]
This article investigates content recommender systems. Because Netflix is probably the best known recommendation system and numerous articles have been published about their system, I will concentrate on their content recommendation mechanism as representative of the type. I will show that the Netflix mechanism contains characteristics of updated theories of emotion—mainly constructed emotions theory—but it [...]
I am a firm believer that success starts with the statement of work (SOW). An appropriate and attainable SOW determines whether my team of UX designers and researchers get the time and activities we require to fully understand a client’s needs and fashion a suitable solution. Regrettably, we often work within overly prescriptive SOWs that [...]
Back in the mid-90s, as the personal computer was booming, I was just your fairly average tween with a Skip-It. I spent my summers in the California sunshine counting: 100, 208, 300, 986, always aching to get to 1,000. While my parents worked long past sunset, I played on the sidewalk of my parents’ company, [...]
Design is a logical art. It’s the thought process behind the first mark on a page. It’s empathy applied systematically. It’s creative through abductive reasoning. In other words, designers are no strangers to strategy. Yet even designers themselves forget that the world of design is much larger than mockups and prototypes. This “capital D” conception [...]
Editors’ note: This “Book in Brief” feature here on Boxes and Arrows is fromLiving in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places by Jorge Arango. We’ll publish an excerpt, up to 500 words, of your book. The catch is that we’ll only publicize one book a month; first come, first serve. Other rules will certainly occur to us [...]