By Cyd

It’s May! Time for graduations and job hunts, and while B|P isn’t hiring right this minute (we have an awesome team and are busy refining our practices) we will be again, before too long. It seemed like a good time for a post on what I look for when hiring user experience researchers, so here goes, in reverse order of importance:

#4: education. If you have less than 3 or 4 years of experience, I’m looking for a degree in a related field, and that really can be anything from cognitive science to anthropology to HCI to…well, surprise me, I can be convinced. If it’s from a top school in our field, that’s cool, but it’s no big deal if it’s not. A Master’s is nice for showing a commitment to the field, but doesn’t tell me much about you as a practicing researcher. And whether you do or don’t have a related degree, you’ll definitely grab my attention with interesting people-oriented research projects during your education. (If you have more than 3 or 4 years of experience, I don’t much care where you went to school or what you studied—I’ll be evaluating your professional record exclusively.)
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By Frances

What do expectant mothers have to do with Aunt Jean’s plans for her family vacation on a cruise?

We recently finished up a couple of fun studies where we ended up recommending that the client take a look at some websites that were from a totally different industry than their own. In the example above, we were trying to introduce methods that might heighten the anticipation of a soon-to-be cruise vacationer. Who else is super excited about an upcoming, very special event? Mothers-to-be! Baby Center has a service that will email you periodically with cute updates about how many toes your little one now has, or reminders to pick out nursery paint & furniture. We thought a similar style of email to cruisers would be fun and useful for them to receive- just little notes with prompts of what to pack, how to plan for their shore excursions, etc.

We also pointed our car insurance clients towards an unexpected source when we brought up the Anthropologie website during a recent presentation. We liked the one-page checkout approach that Anthropologie uses, and thought having all the info laid out on a single page might work well for users trying to complete their car insurance purchase. It didn’t hurt that the ladies in the room were psyched to check out the threads for sale during the process.

Since we have expertise across different fields from working with a bunch of diverse clients, it’s been hard not to notice some similarities between them, and we’ve found our clients responded well to these suggestions. It gets them thinking outside the box, sparking discussion, and bringing in ideas that they might never have encountered from just exploring their competitor sites. Anybody else have any positive (or negative) experience in sharing ideas from completely different industries as a possible example for clients to generate ideas from? We’d love to hear ‘em!

By Tony

One thing we’ve always wanted to have is a way to allow multiple people watching one of our research sessions to take automatically time-stamped, collaborative notes–everyone working in the same document, live, with entries labeled by author. Then I realized that it’s been under our noses the whole time: IM chat rooms! With a simple piece of free software, you’ve got a time-stamping, notetaking powerhouse at your disposal. And it even supports smileys. All it takes is a little ingenuity!
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