Lean & User Experience, again
Over the years I’ve written a few posts about the relationship between Lean and User Experience. But in looking back on those, I don’t feel like I ever did as thorough of a job as I would like in connecting the two domains. So when I was asked last year to contribute to a new book called The Handbook of Business Anthropology, edited by Rita Denny and Patty Sunderland (who also wrote Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research). I proposed a chapter about Lean and Agile, because I feel that these are two critical trends for user experience professionals to understand. As I...
Read MoreRecognizing Lean
Here is my list of the Top 7 ways to know you’re working in a Lean environment: You keep hearing references to Lean that don’t refer to Cuisine or cuts of meat. You keep hearing Japanese terms like kaizen or muda. People are talking about Flow, but they are not referencing the positive psychologist Csikszentmihalyi. You hear references to Value Stream and you’re not sure what people are talking about. You’re told that the team is trying to achieve Customer Pull, but you’re not sure you want to be pulled by a customer. You learn later that this means a rate of production based...
Read MoreWheat Belly
I finished the book Wheat Belly by Dr. William Davis earlier this week, and I recommend it! But before I summarize what the parts I found the most compelling, let me give you a little background about how I found myself reading in the first place … We introduced oat cereal to our oldest son shortly after rice cereal (around 5-6 months), and quickly figured out that the resulting skin rash and prolific vomiting warranted serious medical attention. In working with a childhood allergy specialist at Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania (CHOP), we learned that he...
Read MoreSehnsucht – addictive yearning
It’s rare that I have a chance to do more than skim the headlines of my RSS reader, but there are a few that I check regularly. One of those is Elezea, written by Rian van der Merwe. He writes at the intersection of technology, design, and sociology, so the topics are almost always of interest. Plus, by my standards he’s prolific – there is always something new and interesting to read! At the beginning of the summer I wrote a post about Digital Hoarding, so I was especially interested in his reference to a well-written article about online curation from the New York...
Read MoreHumanizing Business Technology
I attended the The Qualitative Report’s Fourth Annual Conference at the end of this week. I enjoyed listening and learning to many of the sessions, and on Saturday morning I presented the Closing Plenary. In addition to sharing a bit about my own personal and professional journey, I also had a chance share my thoughts about the impact that social sciences and design can have on technology in the business setting. Humanizing Business Technology View the complete presentation on SlideShare. Abstract How can methodologies from the social sciences – and from other fields...
Read MoreCultivating moral jazz
Overview A couple of years ago I was a member of Creative Good’s UX Councils, and I had a chance to hear Barry Schwartz present a keynote based on the insights from his book Practical Wisdom. He is also the author of bestseller Paradox of Choice. That presentation continues to inform my thinking and the connections I’m making to other ideas, so I thought I would recap some of the most influential elements here. When I heard him speak, Barry introduced his presentation by telling us that what prompted the book (co-authored with Ken Sharpe) was the sense that we had was that...
Read MoreCampaign computing
I guess it’s a little anticlimatic to be writing about the US presidential election now, but I’m going to do it anyways! For me one of the interesting trends this year was to see how central big data and sophisticated computing have become to our election activities. There were a whole series of terrific posts during that time, and I wanted to share a few of them in this post. But first <ahem> a little confession to let you know where I acquired the visual below. One of my guilty pleasures is following the Barack Loves Michelle blog. The blogger posts...
Read MoreMultiscreen mobility
Over the past few weeks I’ve encountered a number of interesting articles which describe how the device landscape (and their patterns of use) are complex, and vary significantly by the user, the device type, and the task at hand. This creates all kind of challenges and opportunities for those of us working in the fields of user experience, software development, and related fields! A visualization of broadband usage data by device type starts to paint a picture of how usage varies by device: One of the first posts I read in this vein was by blogger Luke Wroblewski, who evaluated the...
Read MoreDigital hoarding
When we moved from the Philadelphia area to Chicagoland late last year, we moved into a house that’s about half the size of the one we left behind. Our new place is a sweet little Dutch Colonial built in 1924, and it’s been almost completely redone inside and out. But the reality is, I think the 1000+ square feet that we lost in the move must have been storage space! We have some stuff in a storage unit, but our garage and attic are stuffed to the gills. Some of you may be familiar with an A&E television show called Hoarders. It is a fascinating and disturbing show...
Read MoreOn Lego
It’s hard to say who is more obsessed with Lego bricks – my kids, or their parents! My partner and I both feel that our childhoods were poorer for not having had our own Lego toys. We’ve made up for it by having more Legos in the house than we could possibly ever play with! The kids received small Lego kits for Christmas and Easter, and I am always stepping on some half constructed piece or part. For Christmas the boys also received an annual pass to Legoland, which is not far from us. I took my oldest during his Spring break (see picture taken in the lobby,...
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