The State of User Research 2021

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…
A team of researchers from IMD in Switzerland and SUTD in Singapore put together the Smart City Index. For the first time, researchers attempted to assess people’s perceptions of technology – as opposed to the quality of the technology itself…
The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias Stanford University Press August 2019, 352 pages Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity…
“I don’t own the data”: End User Perceptions of Smart Home Device Data Practices and Risks Madiha Tabassum, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Tomasz Kosinski, Chalmers University of Technology; Heather Lipford, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Paper included…
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.…
The age of social media has opened up exciting opportunities for researchers to investigate people’s emotional states on a massive scale. For example, one study found that tweets contain more positive emotional words in the morning, which was interpreted as…
The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond the West by Payal Arora Harvard University Press, 2019 280 pages A digital anthropologist examines the online lives of millions of people in China, India, Brazil, and across the Middle East – home…
Consumer insights into the circular economy Report of stakeholder meeting, 25 October 2018, 14 pages The “Stakeholder Meeting: Consumer Insights into the Circular Economy” in Brussels on 25 October 2018, was co-organised by the Collaborating Centre on Sustainable Consumption (CSCP)…
Left to Our Own Devices: Outsmarting Smart Technology to Reclaim Our Relationships, Health, and Focus Margaret E. Morris MIT Press, 2018 192 pages Unexpected ways that individuals adapt technology to reclaim what matters to them, from working through conflict with…
You might be surprised by what occupies Daniel Kahneman’s thoughts. “You seem to think that I think of bias all the time,” he tells esteemed economist Tyler Cowen. “I really don’t think of bias that much”. These days, noise might…