Engaging business stakeholders as observers in usability testing is a good thing. But what should you do when the CEO asks to participate in a usability session? — While it is uncommon that the busy stakeholders will nominate themselves as participants in usability testing, it happens. Especially when they are emotionally attached to the new product or feature you’re about to test. Stakeholders — who are immensely involved in the project and talk to customers a lot —…

Prepare research — recruit participants — talk to them — make sense of what you’ve heard. Rinse and repeat. It takes a lot of time and energy to get that invaluable feedback from your customers and you wouldn’t want to waste that effort by letting your ego roll over the interview, right? — Let’s say we’re past the definition of solid research goals and we’re about to run the interview. We’re super eager to grasp the customer’s world and we can’t wait for the meeting. But as it happens, customers aren’t always as excited about new products or features as we are. And…

Survey — the holy grail of understanding your customers at scale. But is it? It depends on how you ask questions. — A survey is a popular technique to collect quantitative data. And also, it’s one of the most difficult techniques to master. The challenge is to design survey questions so you collect relevant data. We all hope to ask questions to get actionable answers to build our decisions upon. When you…

Back in 2015, I got involved in a rather exciting side-project. My mother had been collecting stories about Rusyns who live in North-Eastern Slovakia and who survived World War II. She compiled the fragments of memories into a moving collection of six short stories. …