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blog B|P Livin' Deep Thoughts News

B|P + FB = OMG

b|p + fb = omg

It turns out the Facebook design team is a great place for smart researchers.

For more than ten years, Bolt | Peters has worked with our clients (plus a robot and clay dinosaurs) to improve the design of their sites, apps, devices, video games, and cars. We did that with 238 projects, 24 talks, 18 articles, 11 events, 1 book, 19 weird videos, and 1 app.

But the time has come for our next adventure — at Facebook. The consulting practice of Bolt | Peters will be closing operations on June 22nd, 2012.

While we’ll miss working with our amazing clients, we’re stoked about Facebook’s commitment to user experience, and the design team is a critical part of this.

What about ethnio?

Last week we announced that after five years of growth, ethnio deserved to be its own company. That has not changed. Ethnio remains committed to supporting its customers with real-time research recruiting and more. We know Ethnio is in good hands with some of the people who have worked on it for years at the helm. I will no longer be working there, but will retain ownership. You can find out more about the new team at ethnio and who will be running it by following @ethnio or watching their blog.

User Research Friday and 1197

I’m thrilled to say that our friends at User Interface Engineering will be taking over User Research Friday. They pretty much rule at events. URF lives on. And the fine folks at the New York Soho Gallery for Digital Art will be taking over our mobile photography conference, 1197. Basically, both our product and the events that we’ve enjoyed putting on will live on after Bolt | Peters closes up shop.

Feel free to get in touch with us with any questions, and you can keep up with all of us individually here. Our VP, Cyd Harrell, deserves 100% of the credit for running the consulting side of the business for the past six years. She rules. Thank you, Cyd. And a huge thanks to my co-founder Craig Peters, who has been a friend and advisor for years. But especially, all the team at Bolt | Peters past and present that I’ve had the pleasure of working with – you’ve made our success possible. Thank you guys.

Well. It’s been our privilege to be a part of the the interaction design and UX community as a consulting firm since January, 2002, and we plan to continue to work in that community as part of Facebook. I want to mention that this decision did not come lightly. Our clients, colleagues, team, and advisors are simply the best. They are our partners. They are our friends. And we sincerely thank you.

– Nate Bolt

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blog B|P Livin' Deep Thoughts Events

Ten-Year Reflections

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blog B|P Livin' UX Design

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.

 

Photo by Nathan Strandberg and Katie Kirk of Eight Hour Day.

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blog B|P Livin' Uncategorized

B|P X3 at SXSW12

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B|P Livin' ethnio Research innovation

Twitter+Ethnio: a case study

target + birdie

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:

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blog B|P Livin' Deep Thoughts Published Papers Research innovation

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:

1. The ZDNet article about our article
2. The UX Magazine article we wrote
3. A Weekly subscription to ridiculous sun glasses.

That last one is really only included as proof that this blog has sort of been eclipsed by our use of Twitter. I mean we use this so much less now. Kind of crazy. I never would have thought this, but maybe we’ll just replace this with a nice-looking summary of all our tweets.

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blog B|P Livin'

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.

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Best Practices blog B|P Livin' HCI

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.)

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blog B|P Livin'

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.