It was the summer of 2010, during the first year of my PhD, when I was being examined by the dean of the Design School in her office, in order to progress to the second year. I was one of the newest students, trying to explain my research to the most senior academic in the…

This piece was originally produced as part of my contribution to the Contemporary Issues in Ergonomics and Human Factors, a teaching module for the master’s program at the School of Psychology, University of Derby. It was produced alongside a podcast to foster discussions with students during workshops and lectures A few years ago I was…

One of the oldest and most frequently used methods to understand users, their needs, attitudes and behaviours is the interview. After you developed a questionnaire, you can use it verbatim and you will get consistent and structured answers. You can also use a semi-structured questionnaire, where you have the basic questions, but have the freedom…

Recently, companies are paying more attention to the experience of their workforce. As the name suggests, employee experience (EX) concerns the study of the quality of experiences during work, as perceived by employees. EX is sometimes referred as enterprise UX, which is the design of products for people at work. It includes any software, device…

I’ve been performing usability studies for different projects to evaluate products and services in diverse technology readiness levels. Below I give some examples of recent work performed where I applied UX, user-centred design and ergonomics research to understand how people interact with the systems in question. Internal vehicle HMI As part of the UK Autodrive…

I’ve designed a few customer journey maps as part of the deliverables to a large innovation project. This work is part of a consortium formed by two academic institutions and four industry partners named CLoSeR. The collaborative nature of this research requires synergy between academia and external organisations, combining research methods to better inform the…

One of the design tools used to provide a clearer picture of users beyond market segmentations and demographics is personas. They can give a precise description of users and define what they wish to accomplish, representing archetypical users to facilitate the understanding of their behaviours, needs, motivations, characteristics and limitations. Having a small set of personas…

One of the most used methodologies applied to understand users and their experiences are interviews. Online, phone-based or face-to-face semi-structured interviews are performed to understand user expressions of attitudes, feelings, preferences, needs and behaviours. Using a semi-structured method it’s possible to explore in more depth specific aspects raised by participants, and allow for richer data…

One data collection methodology that I sometimes use is the observational method called ‘shadowing’, when a trained researcher investigates, unobtrusively, the activities that individuals perform as they go about their business. Shadowing involves a field visit, which gives the opportunity to observe and meet people where they are comfortable, at their habitual places of work.…

We are seeing the use of alternative approaches to measure user attitudes, specifically, those that offer more robust, useful and actionable attitudinal data. One of these methods is the Best-Worst Scaling (BWS), which has risen in popularity as a choice-based measurement approach. BWS experiments collect both “best” and “worst” information from a set of statements…