I work at a liberal arts college and I’m the only person on campus with “UX” in my job title. Students across departments have sought me out for project consultations, career discussions, and general brainstorming about UX research and design possibilities. I love these meetings! As I’ve shared my experience…

I’ve been spending the past weeks helping faculty and students transition to an online learning environment in response to COVID-19. This shift has been challenging for all of us, as we try to navigate our new reality of uncertainty, instability, and anxiety. Headlines and online discussions show that campuses nationwide…

While it might seem that user-centered design practices and UX capacities are ubiquitous, there are plenty of industries where it’s still a new horizon. Here’s some advice I wish I’d gotten when starting out. — I work in an industry (higher education) where there can be a lot of institutional and cultural gaps between users and system designers & administrators. In this context, it can be challenging to highlight connections between poor UX and user outcomes.

There’s a conversation that happens a lot in my institution when we talk about interface design. “Sure, we want this to be simpler for beginners,” people say. “But what about the experts?” Indeed. What about the experts? It feels like an intractable problem, as beginner and expert preferences often seem…

We’re awfully confused about greed in America. Is it good? Is it a sin? How do we stop it? Can we? Reviewing the science provides some interesting answers, along with more questions. First, what is greed? One working definition by Terri G. Seuntjens and others describes greed as, “the tendency to always want more…

This past year, Maximilian Maier, a master’s student at a Swedish university conducted a qualitative study seeking to understand end users’ perceptions of manipulative design, or deceptive patterns. Here’s what participants had to say: “[T]hey are forcing me to do something like buy stuff, click or see something, get some…

I’ve been struggling for the past few months with failure. The more I read and the more podcasts I listen to, I find myself longing for something specific and strange. I crave a continual stream of people sharing their stories about how they’ve failed…and how they’re still failing. Not because…

It’s 4:11 pm on a Friday, and I may have just saved us over $1,500 in medical bills. Or maybe not. I’m still waiting for a call from the doctor’s office. And even then, I won’t really know until we get the final bill, weeks afterwards. I’ve made over thirteen…

A retelling of Goblin Market, in a contemporary fantasy setting Her sister perches on the barstool, waif-like, delicate ankles crossed and one wrist draped over her drink. She is laughing, a high false trill that makes Stone want to slap her. Stone grips her lager like a cudgel and says…