Community: Sample Chapters

This is a sample chapter from Steve Portigal’s new book Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. 2016 Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 11: The Myth of Objectivity

In our culture in general, we place a high premium on the notion of objectivity. We hold high the values of fairness and neutrality. Journalists frequently face the criticism of bias. But the endeavors of law, news, science, and user research are led by humans. Unlike Vulcans, humans are not wholly led by logic. The field of behavioral economics, increasingly totemic for business people of all stripes, seeks to understand the ways in which people’s behaviors and decisions are influenced by irrational factors.

The field of science has long understood this about people, establishing the practice of blind experiments in the 1700s. In blind experiments, the subjects who received different conditions didn’t know what those conditions were. Starting in 1907 and fully established by the 1950s, the double-blind experiment goes even further. In a double-blind experiment, neither the subjects nor the experimenters know what the conditions are. Read More

This is an excerpt from Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast’s book Figure It Out: Getting From Information to Understanding. 2020, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 11: A Pattern Language for Talking About Interactions

Epistemic actions are … a mechanism for spreading cognitive processes across brain, body, and the world. They allow us to see wildly different behaviors as serving the same cognitive purpose. …

In this chapter, we are going to describe a suite of epistemic interactions that people use to create meaning, solve problems, make decisions, establish plans, analyze information, and do other cognitively complex tasks. Taken together, they serve as a versatile vocabulary for describing how people figure things out, … an invaluable framework for pinpointing the underlying cognitive work that drives the understanding process. …

Our interaction vocabulary … provides a way to separate the visual trappings of our digital world—windows, menus, and scrollbars—from the essence of how we interact to figure things out. Moreover, these interactions are not tied, in any way, to a particular technology. They can also be used to describe how we create understanding with paper-based technologies, or virtual reality, or any other technology—even ones that have yet to be invented. … Read More

This is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of Jessica Enders’s new book Designing UX: Forms. 2016 SitePoint.

Chapter 5: Flow

Paper forms are static. Immobile, unresponsive, fixed. Forms come alive when they’re on the Web: questions can appear or hide, errors can be flagged and corrected, and the experience can be tailored to users and their needs.

In this chapter, we’ll see how to best design all these user interactions and more. Because we want the total user experience to feel smooth and painless—like gliding down a river—we’ll call this aspect of form design flow. Read More