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On Empathy and why AI will never replace high-quality UX research
There’s no substitute for empathy—not in the doting sense of the term, but in the ability to perceptively inhabit other people’s psyches, and thus imagine what various stimuli will feel like to them. Brian Beutler I have been digging deep into AI the last 20 months or so, learning, reflecting, evaluating. I understand how it…
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Time to get out of your (home) office, and observe your users in their habitat: Contextual Inquiry
As UX professionals, we’re always striving to truly understand the people we’re designing for. During the pandemic, when all we could do was remote user testing, interviews and surveys (if we were lucky, we used dscout to run diary studies to get some badly needed user-recorded context) , our understanding fell short of revealing the…
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UX Reckoning – January 2025
Many UX professionals (myself included), rightfully, feel threatened by AI’s ubiquity. It is uncanny how long it has come in an extremely short time right before our eyes. I remember hearing about it at the Computer Science department where I used to teach, and I dismissively thought this was just a hobby for nerds. How…
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Inclusive UX = Thoughtful Design
What is Inclusive User Experience? As the name suggests, users (people, site visitors, clients, customers, etc) feel that they personally are considered and welcome in that space, be it digital or physical. One example is the Humans come in all shapes and sizes, abilities, preferences, cultures, past experiences, identities, and sensitivities. Caring individuals take all…
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Python Data structures
Features List Tuple Dictionary Set Series (pandas) Dataframes (pandas) Ideal for Sequential, mutable data Sequential, immutable data Mapping data Removing duplicates, set operations Time series, single variable analysis Multi-variable analysis, data manipulation Main Use case Storing ordered collections Immutable sequences Key-value pairs Unique elements Single column data Tabular data Data type Any Any Any (for…
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If only we could talk to more of our users …. B2B edition
The bane of any UX researcher’s work is finding participants to get relevant information. Well, in some B2C contexts it may not be so difficult, as long as you make sure your participants are indeed the ones you want to talk to – more on screening willing people as often some are just not who…
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Standard Linear Regression with Python
Regression OLS with Python Data analysis and coding are part of the skill set of a UX researcher – especially when working with quantitative data. There are so many sources of information to learn from – but in my experience, they are not equally useful, or functional. This is the first Jupyter notebook where I…
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AI is changing everything
We have had AI around for more than a decade now, but for most people, there was nothing earth-shattering about it. As in, humans did not see their world change in a dramatic way just because there was a chatbot on their bank’s website, or their email client sorted their incoming messages into folders. Maybe…