Category: Field Note
Brief essays and conceptual sketches that don’t fit elsewhere. Often unfinished, always interpretive — these pieces hold tension, surface contradiction, and offer a space to think around the edges of UX practice.
-
Triangulation in UX Research
Why does the call for rigour so often collapse into a checklist? Triangulation promises rigour. But too often, it delivers repetition. Researchers reach for it not to surface contradiction, but to secure consensus, three methods, three data types, one tidy insight. It becomes less a practice of inquiry than a form of pre-emption: anticipate critique…
-
Stakeholder Listening as UX Method
A fictional scenario drawn from real research patterns, this article explores stakeholder listening not as admin, but as method. When user insights fail to land, it’s often not a matter of evidence, but translation, of making meaning legible across internal systems of power, fear, and decision-making.
-
The Ethics of UX Research Tools
We often ask participants to be transparent, but not our tools. This piece explores how platforms — from sentiment analysis to AI summaries — quietly shape meaning before we begin. What ethical questions should we ask of the systems we rely on?
-
Metaphor as Frame, Not Verdict: Rethinking the ‘User Journey’ in UX Research
Introduction — The Tension Metaphors are shortcuts to understanding. They compress complexity into something we can name, point to, and discuss. In multidisciplinary teams, they give everyone—from engineers to product managers—a shared reference point. They orient attention and provide a common language for navigating ambiguous problems. But this same clarity can close things down. Once…
-
Designing at the World-Minute: Lessons from Stefan Zweig for UX Decisions
Some moments decide everything. Drawing on Stefan Zweig’s Decisive Moments in History, this piece reframes high-stakes “world-minutes” for UX, with six vivid tests to design the moments that matter most.
-
The Shape of Letters: From Calligraphic Hand to Pixel Grid
From the sweep of a calligrapher’s brush to the precision of a pixel grid, letterforms carry the traces of their tools, cultures, and makers. This essay explores how global traditions, shifting materials, and human agency have shaped — and continue to shape — the evolving language of typography.
-
The Interview They Thought They Saw
Fictional UX research case inspired by Frost–Nixon, revealing how listening can be staged—and four practical steps researchers can take to keep it honest.
-
A Week of Searching
An observational fiction about how we look, what we notice, and what we might misread
-
Silence in usability moderated tests, inspired by John Cage
I recently watched a video of a pianist performing John Cage’s 4’33”. It is quite an inspiring performance, especially when we consider the pianist’s use of silence and how this also has relevance for usability moderated tests. In the video, we see the pianist first sit at the piano, then, he places a score on…
-
Can Susan Sontag inspire inclusivity and UX storytelling?
The problem rarely announces itself as cultural. It appears as a misunderstanding that no one can quite locate. The interface is clear. The copy is translated. The flow passes usability checks. And yet, users hesitate, disengage, or behave in ways the team did not anticipate. In post-mortems, the explanation is often vague. “Different markets behave…