As you may already know, I am a knitwear designer. This means I come up with ideas for things I think other people may want to knit and make them. Then, and this is the part that distinguishes a knitwear designer from a knitter, I teach other people how to make exactly the same thing by writing a pattern. A pattern is like a recipe. It conveys the information necessary to recreate the original.
Read MoreWho's Looking for Yarn
As part of the process to fine tune my UX skills I am consulting with several small businesses to develop their websites. One of the businesses is an independent yarn dyer wanting to expand into online sales. To get a feel for their target audience I interviewed local yarn store employees. The customer base for a small yarn store strongly overlaps the customer base for an independent yarn dyer. In both cases, customers know that other options besides big box craft stores exist and are willing to pay premium prices for high quality goods.
Long-term yarn store employees have a great sense of the types of people who come in to shop or call with questions along with the goals and concerns those people have. After the information gathering sessions I compiled these insights into customer archetypes.
Read MoreAnother Fine Use of Sticky Notes
For quite a while I was stuck while in the process of designing my online portfolio. I had some ideas. I had some projects. I had some blog posts. What I didn't have was a plan.
How should the information be presented? How were all these various examples connected? What if a prospective employer wanted to know about my design process? What if someone wanted to see examples of a specific skill? What if a particular example falls under both categories--would I need to write about it in two different locations?
Luckily I've been studying user experience techniques.
Read MoreBreathe Easy
So I'm not great at remembering when to change the filter for the air conditioning unit. To remember I follow my nose, almost literally, since my allergies flare up if I haven't changed the filter recently. But I know that's not the best solution.
Read MoreHCI Course Part 8 - The End and The Beginning
This is part eight in my series about the Human-Computer Interaction course I took through Coursera. Read all my posts for the full story.
Assignment 6 User Testing - Results
After we ran three or more user tests following the procedures we created we had to analyze our observations.
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