Expert Quant UXR advice from Sauro and Lewis

It was a Monday afternoon. My coworker Jason, a Senior UX Researcher, was talking through a study. Jason had done most of the planning and I had done most of the analysis. There were dozens of people on the Zoom call, most of which were much higher than me on the totem pole, and many…

Design ethics books

Ruined by Design by Mike Monteiro and The Ethical Design Handbook by Trine Falbe, Kim Andersen, and Martin Michael Frederiksen TL;DR: If you want passionate, angry inspiration and high-level advice, read Ruined by Design. If you want good case studies and scattered tactical tips, read the Ethical Design Handbook. If you, like me, are practicing…

Radical Candor for individual contributors

I win a lot of contests. In NHL hockey games, there are 3 periods of play with intermissions between. Often, they'll choose 2-3 people from the crowd of 20,000 people and ask them to play a funny game to win a prize. I don't know how, but I've been chosen for these dumb games THREE…

Making the “Switch” to running

I recently read the book "Switch" by Chip and Dan Heath. I was inspired to read it by TS Balaji, who mentioned it in his interview with DesignBetter. I expected it to be all about corporate change management, but was happy to see it cover everything from large-scale cultural change to individual change. Instead of…

Visualizing vesting schedules

I recently wrote about the book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte. That book inspired me to explore ways of visualizing the vesting of savings and awards. Background Skip this section if you know equity! Vesting Vesting is when stock or cash becomes available. This allows companies to reward their employees for…

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte- Book review

"A little light reading, hey?" the doctor from Pennsylvania asked me on a recent flight. "Do you have to read that for a course or something?" "No," I said as I showed him a fascinating chart of Napoleon’s army’s advance to and retreat from Russia, "I'm actually just reading it for fun." And despite the…