Tag: User Research
Aurelius Podcast: Episode 45 – International & Cross Cultural UX Research with Komal Faiz
Aurelius Podcast: Episode 44 – Psychology, Behavioral Economics & UX with The Team W | Susan & Guthrie Weinschenk
Aurelius Podcast: Episode 43 – Articulating Better Design Decisions with Tom Greever
Aurelius Podcast: Episode 42 – UX Research Process & Practice with Bethany Stolle
Aurelius Podcast: Episode 37 – DesignOps & ResearchOps in the Enterprise with Fred Beecher
The Essential Guide to User Research Notes
User research notes are the building blocks of customer insights. Without useful and effective note-taking, we can’t hope to uncover true user needs and deliver an experience that solves their problem or meets those needs.
This post is a recap of our webinar with special guest Bethany Stolle, Design Research Lead at Blackboard. Read the post below to view the slides and full recording of our session!
How to Create an Affinity Diagram for UX Research

What is an Affinity Diagram?
An affinity diagram is a tool often used to organize data and ideas. Affinity diagrams help you organize information into groups of similar items to then analyze qualitative data or observations.
Business and design teams have used affinity diagrams for a long time to organize ideas, complex information and even customer feedback into themes or groups. For UX researchers, affinity diagrams are often used for analyzing and synthesizing user research findings by patterns and themes. In this case affinity diagrams are sometimes referred to as the KJ method or an affinity map. Also in other broad application like business brainstorming or idea generation it may be called a cluster map.
read more… “How to Create an Affinity Diagram for UX Research”Aurelius Podcast: Episode 36 with Natalie Hanson on Sharing and Communicating User Research
Episode 36 highlights with Natalie Hanson on Sharing and Communicating User Research:
- Differences between in house and external UX teams and the unique challenges of each
- Tips for collaborating with others on your user research work
- How to encourage non-designers and non-researchers to collaborate on user research and insights
- Tips for working with stakeholders who believe they already know what needs to be designed
- Effectively communicating user research insights to inspire action from executives, developers and more
Organize and Share Your User Research with a Central Repository
Create Company Wide Empathy with a User Research Repository
Creating insights to share and act on is the most important work you do as a UX or user research professional.
Your research must create a sense of empathy for the people you’re designing for with your team and company. This means your insights and findings must be clear, findable and actionable.
With rapidly changing expectations and methods for communication and sharing knowledge, it’s critical to start building a sustainable research practice right away that builds institutional knowledge of your customers.
Doing so generates better intuition and decision making, as well as wide spread empathy at your organization.
Investing in a user research repository to organize, search and share everything you learn from customer research early helps you accomplish these things and build true customer empathy in your organization.
read more… “Organize and Share Your User Research with a Central Repository”