The Team W Blog – Behavioral Science, Brain Science, And Design, By Susan Weinschenk, Ph.D.

June 17, 2017

Updated User Testing Course

At The Team W we’ve updated our User Testing online video course. This latest version of the course has been filmed in our new studio. We’ve expanded and updated the content. The video clip below will give you an idea of what’s in the course.

You can get details on the course, preview some lessons, and/or register for the course at the User Testing online video course page. The User Testing course is also included in our User Experience Certificate curriculum.

To see the catalog of all of our online video courses, go to the main course catalog page.

June 14, 2017

The Future Of Retail

Many retail store chains are closing stores. Some say retail stores are a dying breed, and that shopping malls are also in trouble. What is the future of retail? Will technology save the day or is technology part of the reason retail is in trouble?

HumanTech is a podcast at the intersection of humans, brain science, and technology. Your hosts Guthrie and Dr. Susan Weinschenk explore how behavioral and brain science affects our technologies and how technologies affect our brains.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

June 2, 2017

How well do you know your EEG from your GSR?

Our guest, Spencer Gerrol from Spark Neuro gets in the weeds with us in this episode and explains all things neuro-measurement. How well does EEG measure interest and engagement? Can you tell what people are feeling? Which emotion? What does GSR (galvanic skin response) add? Anything? And facial recognition? Are these measurements better than using fMRI? Spencer has a unique ability to really go deep and yet make the information easy to understand. If you want to learn about the latest in neuro-measurements listen to this episode.

You can find out more about Spark Neuro and contact Spencer directly from the Spark Neuro website.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

May 17, 2017

Deciding What’s Ethical

Sometimes I think we get so busy with designing ads, marketing campaigns, or the interfaces for digital products that we forget to stop and think about whether our products and campaigns are ethical. And if you do stop to think about ethics you might not even know where you stand on the question, “Is what I am doing ethical”? What does ethical mean in our digital and advertising soaked world? In this podcast episode we take a shot at discussing how to go about discussing (!) ethics in design.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

May 10, 2017May 10, 2017

Different Processes For Designing Stuff

You’d think there would be agreement on the best process to follow if you are going to design a digital product. But there’s not. In this podcast episode we go “into the weeds” a bit and talk about four popular methods for doing design, and their pros and cons: Lean UX, Design Thinking, Agile, and User-Centered Design (UCD). If you are an experienced designer I bet you have some opinions on which process is the best, and perhaps some strong disagreements on what we say about each.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

May 3, 2017

What’s Wrong With Gamification?

A couple of years ago “gamification” was a hot topic. Product managers of software, apps, and internal company intranets and training programs attempted to take the factors that make games engaging and apply those to non-game digital products. The results have largely been less than successful. In this podcast episode we talk about what makes a game a game, and why gamification fails.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

April 11, 2017April 11, 2017

What We Learned At The Habit Summit

We just got back from attending and speaking at the Habit Summit conference in San Francisco. We share some of the things we learned from the speakers at the Summit, such as: a new app that purports to fix your tech/life balance, that instead of “Hooked” everyone now wants to get “Unhooked”, and that the “little black dress” came from Coco Chanel (ok, apparently everyone knew that last one already except for me).

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

March 29, 2017March 29, 2017

Photography and Design: James Chudley Is Our Guest On HumanTech Podcast

How much do you think about photography in the design of websites and digital marketing? James Chudley joins us on this podcast episode to talk about photography, design, and lots more. And here are some links for things we talk about:

James has a great ebook :Usability of web photos book – http://amzn.to/2nIyOt5

And he has a post about How to run a user centred photoshoot article – https://medium.com/vantage/how-to-run-a-user-centred-photoshoot-97918b17a4e4

We also mention the cxpartners blog – https://www.cxpartners.co.uk/our-thinking/

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

March 14, 2017

Why We Still Love User Testing

User Testing as a way to get feedback from people about a product is still going strong. In this episode Susan quizzes Guthrie about the what and how of user testing, and talks about some of her fun and more memorable moments of the hundreds of tests she’s conducted.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.

March 3, 2017

Memory

Did you see the movie Inside Out? Remember the colored memory balls — stacks and stacks of them? Well, that’s not how memory works. In this podcast episode we talk about the way we store and retrieve memories.

You can subscribe to the HumanTech podcast through iTunes, Stitcher, or where ever you listen to podcasts.