Juicy stories and more

Juicy stories sell ideas
By Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks
Storytelling fits into the design process in many places. You probably know that collecting stories is key to user research and ensuring your UX designs tell a clear story makes the resulting user experiences better. But in this column, we’ll focus on that big moment when you have something to share and want everyone on your team to pay attention.

Three reasons why persuasive design isn’t enough to influence change
By Colleen Jones
While there is a lot to like about using design to improve our behavior and our world, achieving that is a tall order. If persuasive design is going to work on a large scale it needs to be complete. Colleen Jones lists three reasons why persuasive design is not enough to make all of its good intentions come to life.

Recruiting participants for unmoderated, remote user research
By Jim Ross
It seems new, online tools for conducting unmoderated, remote user research emerge every week. While this method of doing user research and these tools have generated a lot of interest and discussion, it is also important to consider how best to recruit participants for unmoderated studies. Though one might assume this would be similar to recruiting for moderated studies, very different methods of recruiting are necessary to find the large number of representative participants unmoderated studies require and convince them to participate.

Usability for mobile devices
By Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain
The mobile space is the new Wild West of technology. Much like the Web during the 1990s, mobile is the new domain at the forefront of innovation. Users are discovering new capabilities, integrating them with their daily lives, and experiencing new interaction models. The tech equivalent of indie bands, independent developers—working solo or in small teams—can create innovative new software in the form of mobile applications. These apps have the potential of launching a few software engineers from dorm rooms and garages into tech giants, in the tradition of Google or Facebook. Of course, accompanying this new era of innovation is a new set of usability concerns for software that runs on mobile devices small enough to fit in your pocket, which you can use while simultaneously walking around and interacting with the world around you.