Use a notebook Sketch every idea you have Communicate visually Observe your target audience Build prototypes Talk to people without domain knowledge Discuss with people you don't know Never neglect crazy ideas Think about technology later Don't stick to a particular order Test every hypothesis Never just assume things Practice empathy Be satisfied with 'good enough'… Continue reading How to Design Think
Author: Maximilian Speicher
Scientist, Designer, Part-Time Philosopher.
Pros & Cons of an Industrial Ph.D. Program
From 2013 till 2016 I've done an industrial Ph.D. at Unister GmbH in Leipzig in cooperation with Chemnitz University of Technology. This means that I worked in Unister's R&D department, which at that time developed a novel semantic search engine, and wrote my thesis about the part I contributed to the project. A few days… Continue reading Pros & Cons of an Industrial Ph.D. Program
REFOCUS: Current & Future Search Interface Requirements for German-speaking Users
When looking at current research, there is plenty of existing work inquiring into how users use search engines1 and how future search interfaces could look like2. Yet, an investigation of users' perceptions of and expectations towards current and future search interfaces is still missing. Therefore, at this year's International Conference on WWW/Internet (ICWI '16) my co-author Martin Gaedke… Continue reading REFOCUS: Current & Future Search Interface Requirements for German-speaking Users
Schrödinger’s Website
Before you receive feedback from users, the user experience and usability of your website are both 'good' and 'bad' at the same time.* Through a good design process you can only raise the chances of user experience and usability manifesting as 'good'** once the feedback arrives. * That is, the factors $latex x$ and $latex… Continue reading Schrödinger’s Website
On Design Thinking
According to Patnaik (2009), Design Thinking is "any process that applies the methods of industrial designers to problems beyond how a product should look." The term was already used as early as 1987 by Rowe in his eponymous book in an architectural context and has lately become popular through research done at Stanford University and the Hasso Plattner… Continue reading On Design Thinking
The U Score: Redesigning Usability Testing
Usability testing is often perceived as cumbersome and time-consuming and therefore not thoroughly applied. This was one of the key observations leading to the topic of my PhD thesis. Particularly conducting tests with actual users is often omitted, which results in the release of suboptimal products and websites. In my thesis, I tackle this problem through more… Continue reading The U Score: Redesigning Usability Testing
Lean Support: The Case of HoloBuilder
When I started working on HoloBuilder.com over a year ago, there was no support. Of course, we would've immediately helped anyone who sent us a question via e-mail or Twitter, but those options weren't communicated anywhere. Users accessing HoloBuilder ended up directly in our augmented/virtual reality creator, the only way for communication with us being a… Continue reading Lean Support: The Case of HoloBuilder
The Arrival of the Web 3.0
What is Web 3.0? That’s a good question! And I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to answer it in this essay. Yet, I’ll try my very best to get closer to the answer. There exist several definitions of Web 3.0, none of which can be considered definite. A very general one describes it as… Continue reading The Arrival of the Web 3.0
User Experience Rule #5
V. Good UX aims at reducing tooltips, tutorials and FAQs to a minimum.
Sparkle up Your Website ✨
Recently, for one of my current projects, I was looking for a jQuery plug-in that adds a sparkle effect to DOM elements. However, I couldn't find any that suited my needs. Either, the available plug-ins were way too elaborated for what I had in mind or the sparkle effect just didn't exactly look like I… Continue reading Sparkle up Your Website ✨
2008 – Tales of Design & User Experience 