Encourage a shared understanding amongst your team, for more effective decisions, by applying your design skills to rogue meetings.

A story about misaligned user expectations and technical rational where I constantly make it harder to pedal up hills.

How might we encourage commuters to spread out more evenly along the train cars to prevent overloading in just a few?

Last winter was my first with a dog in NYC, and that meant walks, lots of cold walks. It didn't matter how cold or blizzard-like the conditions were, he still needed to go outside and me with him. This also made for some hilarious dog-romping-in-snow moments. Attempting to photograph these moments was an exercise in futility with my awkward touchscreen friendly gloves and a tiny red button.

Whether the task is purchasing clothes or making a fantasy football trade, its felt like web designers have been focused on specific states of static screens. The web feels like a series of ‘jump cuts’ from screen to screen. We’ve forgotten (or overlooked) that the transition between those screens is just as important to consider as the static screens themselves.

In November 2011, I attended a User Research Friday event, which introduced an idea that’s stuck with me since; the concept of trust in user research, specifically the need for a user to trust the researcher. It seems like such a basic thing but it has such a large impact. So why is trust so important for the researcher and user relationship, and how can we gain that trust?