Category Methods

The story of Spotify personas

Spotify’s product designer Mady Torres de Souza and senior user researchers Olga Hörding and Sohit Karol explain how they developed their personas tool, how they use it today and why it’s so useful for an autonomous, cross-functional organisation like Spotify.…

When ethnography becomes a joke

For a number of years, we have witnessed a diminishing appetite for ethnographic work among commercial clients, writes Patricia Sunderland, PhD and founder of Cultural Research and Analysis, on the site of the Qualitative Research Consultants Association (QRCA). Competition and…

Why data is never raw

“Except in divine revelation, data is never simply given, nor should it be accepted on faith,” writes Nick Barrowman in The New Atlantis. “How data are construed, recorded, and collected is the result of human decisions – decisions about what…

Experiential Futures: A brief outline

Stuart Candy (@futuryst), an award-winning foresight practitioner, Director of CMU Situation Lab and Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Design, recently wrote a short intro to Experiential Futures (XF) for designers interested in transition-oriented practice. He adds: “XF is…