A quick note on setting expectations and increasing participant comfort (without leading) — In 2018 I was conducting research in Malaysia. The interviews were conducted in English. In the normal course of travel, there’s a back and forth negotiation guessing at what the other person is saying. For example, in Germany I remember a guy saying to me “I don’t know the name…

A mixed methods approach for reliable research — Back in 2019, Caylie Panuccio and I wrote an article on how to combat common criticisms that UX research, or qual research in general, isn’t “valid”. See below👇 Yes, UX research is valid: How to handle assertions it’s not real research — By Kayla J Heffernan & Caylie Panuccio (AKA KayCay)kaylajheffernan.medium.com More strategic or risky projects often require more evidence to back them up. …

Advice for year 12 students at UoMs Careers Fair — Last year I gave the keynote at The University of Melbourne’s Careers Fair. The audience was year 12 students who are about to graduate high school and their parents/carers. At the time I tweeted the lessons and a few people asked me to turn it into a blog post. I’ve…

Interviews are a two-way street — you’re interviewing them as much as they’re interviewing you, so do it right Interviews are a two-way street to see if you have the skills required to perform the job, and are a good fit for the company, but equally so for the candidate to gauge whether the company is a match for them. There’s nothing worse than landing a new job and…

Explaining UX with every day things My mother has no idea what I do for a living. She doesn’t even know it’s ‘UX’ let alone what UX is (I have told her, it’s just that the phrase is so foreign to her that she can’t seem to retain the term). One of my sisters always calls…

When a bug really is a feature Bugs, put simply, are errors or defects in a software system. If you work in tech, you’ve probably heard someone say the half-joke, half-truth line “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”. Often this is used in jest or to justify not wanting to fix a particularly difficult bug. We…

Consider this scenario: a UX designer has finished design and has a kick-off with developers. It looks good, and nothing is obviously missing, so they start implementing it. During development, questions are raised — what happens if the user goes off the happy path? What success message should be displayed…

Do’s and don’ts for better error messages. — In 2015, before I wrote on Medium, I wrote this article on my personal website https://www.kaylaheffernan.com/blog/2014/12/9/error-messages. For some reason, according to the analytics on kaylaheffernan.com, this has had a recent spike in readers so I thought I would cross-post to Medium to reach more people. …

Simple tips to improve your resume and cover letter — Anyone who has been responsible for hiring will tell you that screening applicants can be a special kind of hell*. Many hiring managers are still trying to do their day jobs, and perhaps the job of more than one person if they have an unfilled vacancy, so are time poor…