
In Voices in the Code, scholar David G. Robinson tells the story of how one community built a life-and-death algorithm in a relatively inclusive, accountable way, and draws out lessons for the broader struggle to build technology in a democratic way.

Leroy Merlin is a French-headquartered home improvement and gardening retailer. Its Leroy Merlin Source (LMS) platform aims to create and share original knowledge on new ways of living and inhabiting spaces by expert researchers, professionals and stakeholders.

The collection and analysis of data about us now occurs across many aspects of everyday life, but how do people come to understand these complex processes? Drawing on Living With Data research, Susan Oman, Hannah Ditchfield and Helen Kennedy show that people’s understandings of data uses are based on past experiences and predictions about the future.

In this Nature Reviews Method Primer, Eleanor Knott, Aliya Hamid Rao, Kate Summers & Chana Teeger off the London School of Economics focus on the stages and challenges of designing and conducting an interview project and analysing data from it, as well as strategies to overcome such challenges.

AR features in mobile apps are plagued by usability issues such as poor discoverability and findability of items with AR, low-visibility instructions, or vague icons and signifiers.

Julia Tan and Carolina Aldas of Spotify provide some recommendations on how user research and Engineering can improve their collaboration during the Discovery Phase to come up with more feasible product solutions.

Modern day UX research methods answer a wide range of questions. To help you know when to use which user research method, each of 20 methods is mapped across 3 dimensions and over time within a typical product-development process.

“All research is qualitative; some is also quantitative”
Harvard Social Scientist and Statistician Gary King

The people behind Research Bookmark, a vast online collection of UX research resources, have - after months of researching and experimenting - released a search engine built just for UX Researchers.

The Response-ability Summit, formerly known as the Anthropology + Technology Conference, is a unique two-day event that brings social scientists and technologists together to foster interdisciplinary conversations on the important topic of socially-responsible tech.

Although large-scale data are increasingly used to study human behaviour, researchers now recognize their limits for producing sound social science. Qualitative research can prevent some of these problems. Such methods can help to understand data quality, inform design and analysis decisions and guide interpretation of results.

UX Theatre is "the application of any sort of design methodology without including a single user in the process, or including users but merely for show."

It is critical to marry conventional data analytics with a deeper understanding of audience psychology by observing everyday human behavior.

In a year in which Covid-19 has forced researchers to resort to online research, what opportunities for the industry exist in digital ethnography? Liam Kay of ResearchLive reports on the highlights of the Market Research Society’s Digital Ethnography Summit:

The US based user research recruiting platform "User Interviews" has just published its State of User Research 2021 report, based on responses from 525 people who do research as at least part of their job..

From City of London traders to Indian rickshaw drivers, everyone uses a more intimate style of conversation on video calls.

The employee experience (EX) journey map of the US Government’s Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) identifies the moments that matter during a VA employee’s career using the same human-centered design process that VA’s Veterans Experience Office (VEO) has applied in the development…

This article argues [that] the well-publicized social ills of computing will not go away simply by integrating ethics instruction or codes of conduct into computing curricula. The remedy to these ills instead lies less in philosophy and more in fields…

The Milan-based consumer and health research center EngageMinds HUB of the Università Cattolica has done some timely research on how Covid-19 has influenced the behavior of Italians.
The reports are all in Italian, so you should use a translation engine if you want to read them in full. Meanwhile here is a summary.

Last week EPIC people gathered for a panel discussion on remote research to share guidance and inspiration as many of us take on new, remote positions. Here are some of the approaches we discussed, grouped in four themes with resources from epicpeople.org and beyond.