Dog Food is for Dogs: Escape the Crate of Your Perspective with User Research
*Excerpt
Dogfooding—using your own products—is nice, but is it sufficient to produce good design for people who aren’t you? Our familiarity with our projects and their quirks makes us poor substitutes for users in the wild. So just who are these users, and how do you incorporate them into design and development?
In this workshop, we'll explore user experience design and research strategies that will help you design for people who aren’t you.
Description
Our own user experience is not generalizable to our larger user populations. So how do we escape the limitations of our own perspective? How can we learn from these “wild” users while making things that work for them?
Focusing on open source practice, we’ll explore these areas using collaborative, hands-on exercises:
Gamestorming (45 minutes)
We’ll start with a reflective exercise to explore hidden biases, then move on to gamestorming to help articulate the values most important to your own development process.
Participatory Design (45 minutes)
To get at the needs of users, we will demonstrate a participatory journey mapping technique. The group will then collaborate on modeling workflow and process for open source projects that implements user research and design methods.
Participants are encouraged to come with questions and problems from their own projects and organizations. The organizers will select case studies with a particular emphasis on increasing diversity in participation and perspective.
Participants will gain skills in design thinking and participatory design, and come away with workflows, exercises and tools to put to use in their own projects and organizations.
Tags
user experience, participatory design
Speaking experience
Rachel has presented at IEEE Vis 2013, OSBridge 2014, and the PDX Design Research Group.
Amelia has presented at academic conferences such as ASIST and CHI, and recently presented at the Write The Docs conference. She is a frequent workshop facilitator who organizes trainings and discovery sessions for clients and professional groups.
Speakers
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- Website: http://ameliaabreu.com/
- Blog: http://ameliaabreu.com/writing
- Twitter: @ameliaabreu
- Favorites: View amelia's favorites
Biography
UX freelancer/ info studies phd candidate at uw/ writing about tech + culture. data, archives, curation, race, gender, performance + music, tv and sports
Sessions
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- Title: How you tell the story matters: telling better stories and making better technologies
- Track: Business
- Room: B302/303
- Time: 2:30 – 3:15pm
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Excerpt:
What happens when we tell stories? How do we tell stories about the technology we build, why do some stories get told over others? How do we talk about our successes, and how do we not talk about our failures? Whose stories get heard: how do women, people of color, disabled people, and “non-technical” workers get left out of the stories we hear? In this talk, I’ll explore the role of storytelling in technology, and share what I’ve found about telling better stories.
- Speakers: amelia abreu
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- Title: Dog Food is for Dogs: Escape the Crate of Your Perspective with User Research
- Track: Cooking
- Room: B202/203
- Time: 10:00 – 11:45am
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Excerpt:
Dogfooding—using your own products—is nice, but is it sufficient to produce good design for people who aren’t you? Our familiarity with our projects and their quirks makes us poor substitutes for users in the wild. So just who are these users, and how do you incorporate them into design and development?
In this workshop, we’ll explore user experience design and research strategies that will help you design for people who aren’t you.
- Speakers: Rachel Shadoan, amelia abreu
-
Rachel Shadoan
Akashic Labs- Website: http://www.akashiclabs.com/
- Blog: http://www.rachelshadoan.com/
- Twitter: rachelshadoan
- Favorites: View Rachel's favorites
Biography
Data scientist. Data visualizer. Ethnographer. Iconoclast. Pragmatist. Champion for reasonableness. Lover of science and kale.
Sessions
-
- Title: Dog Food is for Dogs: Escape the Crate of Your Perspective with User Research
- Track: Cooking
- Room: B202/203
- Time: 10:00 – 11:45am
-
Excerpt:
Dogfooding—using your own products—is nice, but is it sufficient to produce good design for people who aren’t you? Our familiarity with our projects and their quirks makes us poor substitutes for users in the wild. So just who are these users, and how do you incorporate them into design and development?
In this workshop, we’ll explore user experience design and research strategies that will help you design for people who aren’t you.
- Speakers: Rachel Shadoan, amelia abreu