The practice of note-taking is heavily ingrained. Throughout school, students take notes as a way of remembering things and as a sense-making tool. This carries over into people’s professional lives. There is a time, however, when taking notes is contraindicated: during a listening session. I encourage participants in this UX Mastery community chat to put […]
talk
q&a with UXbookclub melbourne
George Cockerill hosts the UXBookClub in Melbourne. In June 2015 he organized a morning meet-up so that, half a world away, I could chat with the group by Google Hangout on Air. There were some great questions about Practical Empathy, and George did a fantastic job of editing everything together for this 35-minute video of […]
a practical type of empathy
I was excited to be invited to present to DevOps and engineering folks at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference in Santa Clara, 2015. I opened the talk with an example of bringing someone in to give you a different way of seeing your problem. A Practical Type of Empathy (27 minutes) Transcript below.
how to use empathy to build software products
Poornima Viyashanker runs Femgineer, a education company that teaches innovators to build software products. Her series, FemgineerTV, explores different things that affect the software you build and the teams you work on. In this episode, Poornima interviews Indi about mental model diagrams and about cognitive empathy.
rosenfeld media conversation with indi
Lou Rosenfeld interviews Indi about her book (which he published), Practical Empathy. The theme covers how … “We aren’t taking the time to do proper discovery of how another person is thinking before we go out and make designs for them … we aren’t necessarily doing the depth that we could go to … It’s […]
balancing science with person-focused research
O’Reilly webcast Balancing Science with Person-Focused Research (60 minutes). O’Reilly changed their registration process a bit, and you will be prompted to login to your O’Reilly.com account before launching the presentation. (You will need to set up an account if you do not have one.) You will be prompted to complete a registration form and […]
practical empathy
The organizers at UX Lausanne run a little conference I highly recommend. They have made my 23-May-2014 presentation, Practial Empathy, available. (38:05) Transcript below.
tips for listening sessions
Jeff Parks asks me to explain the most important parts of non-directed interviews. I cover scope, sensing your way forward, and explaining to your boss why this technique is important. (… and the joy of really connecting with another person.) I also explain what to place in the recruiting screener instead of the non-directed interview.
boxes & arrows podcast chats
“Intelligence is a poor cousin to understanding.” There is a vast difference between intelligence and understanding. Intelligence is the quantitative data you collect about your users. Understanding is the cognitive empathy you develop by listening to the purposes and intentions of people you’d like to support. Experience design is no longer a thing you do […]
digging beyond user preferences
I present an hour talk to internal designers at Google that explores how you never design for everyone. If you can focus on one or two behavioral audience segments, your support for people will be much more successful. (This talk includes the example of money tracking.)