Having the opportunity to speak to an audience who cares what you have to say and believes they can learn something new from you is a totally surreal experience. Especially when you consider that months of work pours out of you in under an hour. I’ve been speaking at conferences since the fall of 2008. [Keep Reading…]
Archives for 2013
Empathy is the Antidote to Shame
shame n. A painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior. v. To make someone feel ashamed. In her TED talk Listening to Shame, vulnerability researcher Brené Brown exposes the truth about shame: we all feel it. Shame gets in our way. It negatively impacts how we treat [Keep Reading…]
More Empathy, Better Design
“A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” ~ Steve Jobs [Wired, February 1996]
How to Conduct Yourself While Conducting Interviews
I spend most of my time these days coaching senior leaders and product teams on how to build empathy for their customers and colleagues. This is what my consulting business has evolved into over time. One of the tools we use are one-on-one interviews with stakeholders and customers. The goal is to discover the behaviors, [Keep Reading…]
The Enduring Misconceptions of User Experience Design
A couple weeks ago I suddenly saw a resurgence of interest in an article I wrote for Mashable in January 2009 titled, 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design. Later that year I turned it into a presentation and had a pretty good run with it, until I felt that my message was widely [Keep Reading…]
Speaking Up
Two days ago, a prominent designer named Sarah Parmenter published a post titled Speaking Up, in which she revealed the horrific harassment she has endured as a public woman in technology. Sarah and I have spoken at the same conferences and share a lot of the same friends, and I have admired her ability to [Keep Reading…]
Why CAPTCHAs Fail on Marketplace
American Public Media’s popular program Marketplace ran a story on Friday about Ticketmaster finally removing CAPTCHAs from their ticket-buying process. Reporter Sally Herships contacted me to share my thoughts. Captcha-22: When online security hurts sales CAPTCHAs demonstrate that a company cares more about thwarting spam than they do about making things easy for their customers. [Keep Reading…]
5 Years of Pleasure and Pain
It’s absolutely incredible to me that five years have passed since I started this blog. Five years feels like an eternity on the Internet, and yet it still feels so new. This is the place where I explore new concepts, share my experiences and insights, and examine my position on a slew of issues across [Keep Reading…]
Today marks 5 years on Twitter
I can hardly believe that the year is 2013 and today is the 5th anniversary of when I joined Twitter. It may seem like a silly thing to celebrate or even recognize, but to me it’s a moment to remember when things changed forever. My life has taken many twists and turns over the last [Keep Reading…]
