fordes

Image: Affinity Diagram with several levels of groupings in a hierarchy

Grouping sticky notes aka affinity diagramming is a method for analyzing comments, ideas, quotes, observations etc. (aka qualitative data) by clustering similar data (which is on sticky notes) and giving these clusters of data a summarizing title.

I noted …

Cognitive Illusions, common patterns of »irrational thinking« should be overcome: There are books that tell you about these errors and how to avoid them and you can also get an infographic with a list of these, warning you in bright colors. However, it seems that some research on biases may …

»I'm always amazed at how beginning coders rely so heavily on tutorials. If your library doesn't have a tutorial, it doesn't exist.«
Nolan Lawson/ ‏@nolanlawson (link to tweet)

Indeed: From my own experience it is nearly impossible to learn a library (or programming language or mathematical method or…) without a …

Reactive Views are the big thing in the Applications-with-JavaScript field. Applications-with-JavaScript are mostly slightly more interactive Web pages. The basic idea is that, when you change the underlying data (Let’s say a username), the library figures out how to update what you see on the screen.

The big player …

Writing good text to appear as a link is admittedly not the most exciting topic. But if you do it right, you can avoid hassle for the user and improve accessibility.

Let’s start with an anti-pattern: The »click here« link. I use it myself. But it is a bad …

If you do anything related to research and data you will have been in contact with numerical summaries, like average, standard deviation and – more complex and more often abused – the sacred p value, tool of truthiness creation in quantitative research. By reducing your dataset to a single value, you reduce …

I thought it would be nice to collect some recent learnings and share them on this blog so I have a motivation to write down what I consider to be interesting

Confirmation bias

In design, people sometimes tend to get stuck with their one solution. This seemed similar to confirmation …

There are several reasons, why the use of images in qualitative research is not very common. A rather obvious one is that is is harder to handle images with technology ¹. Great amounts of text are easily stored and searched, but images and video have vastly larger file sizes and …

On the anthrodesign mailinglist was a recent discussion on »effective deliverables«. Reading through the replies, one stroke a chord in me:

(Highlight by me)

[…] I ve had a few 'aha' moments in my career where I realize I'm basically talking in "user" language and expecting my audience to be able …

TL;DR: The comfort zone is a bullshit concept

When you search for »comfort zone« on google images you’ll get all sorts motivational graphics. There are many circle (»Veen«) diagrams showing that this »comfort zone«-circle does not intersect with some other circle with vague, but nice terms in …