There are little things you can do to help your users help your business (using Post.news as an example) — Each time your users come to your site or product, whether as brand new visitors or many-times-returning account holders, are you encouraging (and enabling!) them to do one more thing…and is that one…

Rapid Personas, Alignment Personas, and the art of wrangling stakeholders. — TL;DR — Tamara’s Axiom: Any tool that helps to promote alignment around measurable goals, user needs, and priorities — even if that alignment is not based on data — is a good thing. People building things bring a huge, invisible pile of assumptions about who their users are, what those…

How Web 2.0 grumpiness + Web3 hubris are contributing to terrible user experiences on the cutting edge of tech. — My point in a nutshell: Web people are generally not interested in lessons from the past, and experienced tech people don’t need Web3 (at least not yet). Until there’s a meeting of the minds, blockchain UX is going to suck. ( Jargon definitions: Web 2.0 is “the web” today. Web3…

Ten tips from a startup-UX veteran. — Startup job searches are special. You’re going to find a lot of job descriptions that seem boilerplate, many that are looking for purple squirrels (“you must have 15 years of UX experience AND be an ace front-end coder!”). …

And Why You Should Treat Job Descriptions Like Big, Dumb Bullies. We all read job descriptions the same way: we hurry over the parts that we are qualified for, and we over-react to elements we think we are not qualified for. …

I’ll admit it. I’m intimidated by blockchain. I started working in the space a couple of years ago and I’m still at advanced-beginner status. It’s an unfamiliar feeling: I’ve faced dozens of new technologies and domains over my 20+-year UX career, but it’s never felt like this. I’m also totally…

How I fell in love with fake people, and why I’m still smitten today. In 1996 I got my Master of Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) degree from the University of Washington (well, actually my degree was in Technical Communication, which was the name of the HCDE program back…

The Reality & Responsibility of Being an Experienced Woman in Tech I give talks to women in the beginning or middle of their careers. Pep talks to help them get through a job change and or negotiation. I tell them to be brave for 10 seconds, say it, and shut up. I plant a seed of useful guilt: if you don’t…

(and why data annoys me, plus a few bonus tidbits from my time at Amazon.com) My friend Benjamin asked a great question when I published my recent article on personas. I said in that article that one of the reasons an existing set of personas might not have worked could be that: “They were probably created for the entire company, a big bunch of products…