Ten-Year Reflections

Jodi & New York

Very exciting news today!!  We’re welcoming onboard the fabulously accomplished Jodi Leo as Director of UX and the head of our New York office.  We’re beyond excited to be leaning more towards interaction design in addition to creative and accurate research, and Jodi will be helping us do both those things from New York. This also means we have started sharing space at the epic Studiomates in Brooklyn, where we expect to both make the world and our work better, and more rainbow-colored.

B|P X3 at SXSW12

Twitter+Ethnio: a case study

A few weeks ago, for a study of digital readers in university settings, our client had neither a highly trafficked website nor a large recruiting budget. No problem, we said, we can use Ethnio via Twitter.  Normally this method is a great supplement to placing Ethnio code on a website, but for a student audience we were confident we could recruit the whole sample that way.  It actually worked. We picked people out of the middle of the internet based on words they used in their conversations or profiles on Twitter. Here’s how it went and what we learned:

ZDNet Writes an Article About Our iPad Article for UX Magazine

The guys over at ZDNet who cover all things Mac-related have written up a quick summary of our recent comparison of mobile interaction with the Square payment system between the iPad and iPhone. Cool to see this article get so many comments and shout-outs. Both links below:

First New BP Site in Seven Years

I think it’s a badge of honor for web consulting companies to not update their public sites sometimes. It says “hey we’re busy working on your problems, we don’t have time to work on our own.” That’s certainly been the case with boltpeters.com for the last seven years; with some new home pages and design tweaks, it’s basically been the same hand-coded HTML that we put together in 2002. Well, finally, we’ve updated the site. Hope you like it. Definitely drop a line to let us know if it offends every fiber in your body, or otherwise.

So you wanna be a UX researcher?

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.)

B|P Intern Tells All!

The raw, uncut dirt on Bolt|Peters from our intern-for-a-day, UCSD Cog Sci student Jason van Merle. Enjoy! -Tony

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So over spring break I decided to skip the margaritas and take my sliver of free time to visit with Bolt | Peters in San Francisco. Last spring, Nate Bolt and Mike Towber had given a presentation to my cognitive engineering class about B|P and the remote usability testing work they do. After spending so much time studying cognitive ethnography, which emphasizes getting your hands dirty and observing users in context, I got curious how one might observe user interaction without being able to actually view the user! They have an impressive client list, and I found their presentation very interesting, so I thought I’d fly up to San Francisco and check them out. They were kind enough to let me intern for the day.