You may have heard about languishing, recently written about by the amazing organizational psychologist, Adam Grant — the ‘meh’ feeling between depression and flourishing (“I’m not doing great, but I’m not doing horribly”) that everyone is talking about now. “It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression…

The designer came back and asked exasperatedly, “what do I do with this?” He was looking at a research report that was meticulously done, but that did not help translate into something that could inform ideas on a solution or even physical designs. I often get asked by clients, “How…

“We don’t need research. I don’t need to know what happened in the past.” You’re right. Sometimes the past can’t help, especially if all you looked at were demographic information about your users — gender, income, spending habits, apps they use, etc. Boring. …

I’m a big advocate of understanding users’ emotions to make products and services that users love. When I present this in talks or to clients, the biggest question that always comes up is, “I’m totally onboard — but how do you measure people’s emotions?” …

Two weeks ago, I spoke at the Tech In Asia Product Development Conference 2017 in Balai Kartini, Jakarta. I must say, this talk was different. Usually, I have the luxury of talking to an audience that has pretty direct experiences with some aspect of my job — marketing, design, strategy…

To understand UX, let me start with a story. A guy goes to a party. He meets a girl. He goes to her place. He proposes to her. They get married in secret. Her cousin tries to fight him. After his best friend is fatally wounded, he kills her cousin…

I’ve seen some awesome research reports — really detailed, well-thought out research with shiny graphs. I’ve also seen some terrible research reports with random findings and dubious methodologies. Unfortunately, most of them get lumped together. Stellar, horrible, doesn’t seem to make a difference often enough. Upper management opens up their…