User Experience

🚫 How to Run UX Research Without Access To Users. With practical techniques to avoid guesswork and gather insights if you can’t talk directly to users. Attached cheatsheet (with and without access to users) by Nielsen Norman Group. 🚫 Ask for reasons for no access to users: there might be none. ✅ First, study job openings to map existing workflows/tasks. ✅ Make friends with sales, customer success, support, QA. ✅ Find colleagues who are the closest to your customers. ✅ Convey your questions indirectly via your colleagues. ✅ If you can’t get users to come to you, go where they are. ✅ Ask to observe or shadow customers at their workplace. ✅ Listen in to customer calls and interview call centre staff. ✅ Request access to analytics, CRM reports, call centre logs. ✅ Use Google Trends to find product-related search queries. ✅ Gather insights from search logs, Jira backlog, support tickets. ✅ Explore past/ongoing NPS and Voice-of-Customer programs. ✅ Study reviews, discussions, comments for your product/competitors. ✅ Map key themes and user sentiment on TrustPilot, AppStore etc. ✅ Recruit users via UserTesting, Wynter (B2B), Maze, UserInterviews. ✅ Ask for small but steady commitments: 5 users × 30 mins, 1× month. 🚫 Avoid ad-hoc research: set up regular check-ins and timelines. As H Locke noted, if we shed the light strongly enough from many sources, we might end up getting a glimpse of the truth. Ironically, the stakeholders who can’t give you time or resources to talk to users often are the first to demand evidence to support your initiatives. Sometimes the reason why companies are reluctant to grant access to users is simply the lack of trust. They don’t want to disturb relationships with big clients which is carefully maintained by the customer success team. They might feel that research is merely a technical detail that clients shouldn’t be bothered with. Show that you deeply care about that relationship and that you don’t want to disturb it any way. What you do want though is to reduce costs and risk — the risk of drawing wide-reaching conclusions from very little research, or none at all. Your best shot is to explain research as a powerful risk mitigation tool. And: search for people whose priorities align with yours — people who value and see the impact of UX in their units. They would absolutely love to support your work because it also supports their work — and they will put up a good word for you if they only had known that you existed. ✤ Useful resources: UX Research Cheat Sheet, by Susan Farrell from NN/g (attached) https://lnkd.in/eUTHKWvF What Can You Do When You Have No Access To Users?, by H Locke https://lnkd.in/ewHEKhBS UX Research When You Can’t Talk To Users, by Chris Myhill https://lnkd.in/ez5-b6zf #ux #research

Big day for our show Marketing Against the Grain Posted our 200th episode. Passed 2 million downloads. Passed 3 million YouTube views. Nice work Kieran Flanagan Some lessons from doing a podcast for 200 episodes: 1. Cross Promotion Drives Growth - doing guest spots or promo swaps with other shows or being part of a network that promotes you on other shows increases growth significantly by 30-40 percent. 2. Audio and Video at VERY different - what works on audio RSS in terms of content and format often does work as well on YouTube and vice versa. You need a playbook that incorporates both. 3. Feedback is how you grow - Listener round tables, YouTube comments, emails, engagement data make you better. Look at it and make adjustments each week and you get 10x better as those adjustments compound. 4. Guest need time to settle in - The first 5-10 min with a guest is going to get cut as they are getting comfortable and in the flow. You have to plan for that. 5. Guest bring listeners - As someone comes on your show they do bring their audience. Our guest episodes have higher views and downloads than non guest episodes. This is why so many shows are guest driven.

🇷🇴 Understanding what happened in #Romania after a “black swan” result seemed to come out of nowhere, with pre-election polls failing to accurately gauge the elections results. “Networks of Influence: Decoding foreign meddling in Romania’s elections A collaborative investigation into disinformation campaigns and influence operations”: This analysis is the product of a collaborative investigation to substantiate independent research findings, showing how foreign actors actively exploit societal divisions and systemic vulnerabilities to influence electoral outcomes using the case of recent electoral results in Romania as a key example. The authors of this report are researchers & data experts. Andra-Lucia Martinescu and researchers have collected evidence and built an investigation into Romania's case, together with Osavul data team & Dmytro Plieshakov The investigation is a deep study of election interference in 2024, which brings insights into how to counter it. 🔹Using Osavul, an Al-powered information threat detection software, the report identifies 614 networks (webpages, websites, social media channels, accounts), predominantly Russian-affiliated, that amplified the Romanian candidate's profile and narratives across a vast ecosystem of social media platforms (i.e.: Telegram, Facebook, Twitter/X, etc-), spanning multiple continents and languages. 🔹This hybrid operation of election interference, methodically orchestrated to destabilise a NATO and European Union (EU) member state, is shown to extend beyond Romania & reflect a broader geopolitical agenda designed to fracture Euro-Atlantic cohesion, weaken regional resilience, and undermine support for continued war in Ukraine. 🔹The report states that the campaign of destabilisation may not be limited to Russian influence, snd that other foreign actors with similar capabilities and modus operandi (i.e.: China, Iran) are shown to have contributed, albeit in a limited manner, to the dissemination efforts. The authors are still analysing whether this amounts to coordinated actions. 🔹To contextualise the span and scope of this foreign-amplified influence and disinformation campaign, they underline it is crucial to understand pre-existing vulnerabilities, latent rifts and societal divisions that could be effectively weaponised. These qualitative findings complement a growing repository of journalistic investigations and research. It delves into the tactics employed, the vulnerabilities exploited, and the broader implications for European security. Interesting read to understand FIMI & the exploitation of social platform algorithms. 👉🏼 Read the investigation By Sorina Stallard, Alina Balatchi-Lupascu Mihai George Forlafu @Yan Kurtov, Dmytro Bilash Yevhen Popov

Boss, it's not no-code VS custom code. It's knowing when to switch between them. I've built dozens of AI workflows in n8n. Here's the framework that actually works. ✳️ Start with no-code when you need: Speed → Something running today, not next month Standard patterns → Email routing, data syncing, basic AI responses Team collaboration → Non-technical folks will modify it later n8n's 300+ integrations get you from zero to working in under an hour. ✳️ Switch to custom code when you hit: Complex logic → Nested conditionals taking 10+ visual nodes to build Performance walls → Processing thousands of records where JavaScript runs 10x faster Unique AI behavior → Fine-grained prompt control that built-in nodes can't handle 💡 The hybrid approach wins most often. Use n8n's visual builder for workflow structure. Drop in Code Nodes only where you need custom logic. A good analogy would be LEGO vs clay. Standardized blocks snap together fast. Custom molding gives you precision. Smart builders know when to use each. The mistake isn't picking the wrong tool. It's not knowing when to switch. What's your experience? Do you fight with no-code when code would be faster, or over-engineer with custom scripts when simple integrations would work? Follow me, Bhavishya Pandit, for practical AI automation insights 🔥

4 months ago we got an impossible brief...gain 500K users in 3 months. I'm proud to say we just hit 2M users in 4 months, and still growing 10% WOW. To do this we didn't send a single email, pay for an ad, or an influencer, instead we used our community and our tech. Here's our Web3 growth playbook👇 The Web3 Growth Playbook: 1 - Build trust in the market: First you have to have people trust that you are worth their time. There are many projects offering quests, so why do yours? We highlighted our team, our tech, and our successes to prove we were a legit project and worth their time. 2 - Open the aperture: Wallet based quests limit you to Web3 natives. Our tech enables anyone with email or Apple/Google wallet to join in. This allowed us to go beyond just Web3 natives, to create a much larger community by making it easy to participate. 3 - Nail The Value Exchange: There needs to be value for people to take action. We used a combination of early community rewards paid out from our upcoming listing, partner rewards, early access to other projects, mentorships, NFT's, and Discord roles. 4 - Design Quests for key goals : We didn't just ask you to follow us on Discord, rather multiple steps; follow us, and then get a specific role. We didn't just ask you to tweet, we created AI prompts ensuring tweets were unique allowing us to create new trending hashtags each week. 5 - Keep up the momentum: We released new quests regularly, and enabled one off ways to earn points so our admins could award points to any member easily for things like answering question in Discord, participating in a emoji contest, or alerting us to a bug. 6 - Create Rewards: We leveraged our NFT technology to create the Smart Cats, an NFT derivative of a Cool Cat we own. Our community minted over 500K of them in a week. 7 - Create Ambassadors: We created an ambassador program and guided them as to what content to create. In exchange we gave them mentorship, status, and points in return. 8 - Activate your Ecosystem: We are now working with our partners to integrate our quests into theirs, have them offer rewards to our community, and to allow them to personalize experiences with our Smart Pass. So now the pass is the key to our ecosystem, not just our project giving it greater value. We built all of this from scratch with our tech because we didn't see what we wanted in the market. It's provided us with the flexibility to go beyond other questing solutions to drive rapid growth. > 4m individual quests completed in 120 days > 2M users in 120 days > 500K NFT minted in 1 week > 200k unique tweets in 2 weeks > Trending multiple #hashtags > 5k average attendance for Twitter Spaces This effort has been so successful we are now offering the playbook and the Growth Tooling to others. DM me if you're interested to see what we could do for your project.

FOV won’t onboard the next million VR users. Content will. At SIGGRAPH, Meta let folks try the “Boba” prototype with a very wide field of view (reported ~180° horizontal vs. Quest 3’s ~109°). It is still a prototype, and that matters less than people think. VR never had an “immersion” problem. People fell in love back in the DK1 era. Form factor improvements help adoption, and the shift from PCVR to wireless inside-out tracking (and a 80% cost reduction) was huge. But right now the real unlock is not optics. It is retention and user acquisition. What moves the needle: • Content you can only experience in-headset, mostly games. • Strong retention loops and social play that pull friends back daily. • Distribution driven by creators. The next wave of users will buy a headset after watching VR gaming on YouTube, not after reading spec sheets about FOV. VR builders should optimize for session immersion, shareability, and unique to VR experiences. h/t Upload VR for the photo.

It’s no secret Beijing policymakers completely abandoned the bicycle decades ago, handing their streets over to the automobile in the name of prosperity. But in recent years, those policymakers have done a stunning reversal, reallocating significant amounts of that space in the name of liveability. Motivated by the COVID-19 pandemic, starting in 2020, Beijing's transportation department introduced the development concept of "slow travel first, public transportation first, and green first"; implementing a three-year plan to continually improve the quality of the walking and cycling environment. Embodying the Dutch principles of cohesion, directness, safety, comfort and attractiveness; Beijing's network plan totals 220 kilometres in six districts, including a commitment to build a bike lane on every road more than 12 metres wide, and bike priority street (or "fietsstraat") on narrower ones. "Bicycles reflect a city's sustainable development its level of modern civilization. They take the least time to travel short distances, and can be used as a connecting tool between trains and buses, thereby expanding public transport's coverage." - Wang Shuling, Beijing Transport Research Institute. The policy shift is already yielding results: according to ITDP, (e-)cyclists in Beijing now represent 23% of commuters who have shifted from a car as their primary mode. This has contributed to an annual fuel consumption reduction of 60 million litres and decrease in CO2 emissions of 240,000 tons.

Ever wonder why some pricing pages convert effortlessly while others fall flat? After auditing over 200+ pricing pages, I’ve discovered there’s a science to getting it right. Here are 3 key lessons and 6 breakdowns to optimize your pricing page for clarity and conversions: — 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝟭: 𝟯 𝗞𝗲𝘆 𝗟𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗻𝘀: 1. Simplify the Decision-Making Process: The best pricing pages make it easy for customers to understand their options quickly and without confusion. Guide them by recommending a plan or narrowing down their choices. Keep it simple, and they’ll pick faster. Principle: Hick's Law – The more choices people have, the longer it takes them to decide. 2. Highlight Key Features and Benefits: Don’t just list features—emphasize the benefits of each tier. Make it clear what customers gain as they move up the pricing ladder. By showcasing the tangible value of upgrades, you make it easier for users to understand why a more expensive plan is worth it. Principle: Value Proposition Design — Your brand positioning should revolve around what people want, not what you “think” they want. 3. Address Objections Early: Many customers come to the pricing page with concerns about affordability, commitment, or value. Address them directly on the page by offering guarantees, social proof, flexible payment options, or highlighting low-risk entry points. Principle: Risk Reversal — The more you mitigate the risk, the easier it is for them to make a decision. — 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗽𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝟮 – 𝟲 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗣𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗕𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗱𝗼𝘄𝗻 Let’s start with Figma: Figma’s page makes it easy to distinguish between plans using simple color schemes. The call-to-action (CTA) for each plan also stands out. Instead of a generic button, each plan has its own, like “Choose Starter” or “Contact Sales” for enterprises. Each plan progressively highlights more features which keeps things clear and shows exactly what you’re getting as you move up.The design is optimized for visibility—everything important is right above the fold on most desktop screens. You don’t have to scroll endlessly to find out the basics. Unlike most companies, Figma is upfront about the price of its enterprise plan. You still have to contact sales to buy it, but at least the cost isn’t hidden. — If you want to read the in-depth breakdowns of 5 other companies including Monday, Apple, and Fortnite, check the breakdown available in the comments below.

Three weeks ago, our Devsinc security architect, walked into my office with a chilling demonstration. Using quantum simulation software, she showed how RSA-2048 encryption – the same standard protecting billions of transactions daily – could theoretically be cracked in just 24 hours by a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. What took her classical computer billions of years to attempt, quantum algorithms could solve before tomorrow's sunrise. That moment crystallized a truth I've been grappling with: we're not just approaching a technological evolution; we're racing toward a cryptographic apocalypse. The quantum computing market tells a story of inevitable disruption, surging from $1.44 billion in 2025 to an expected $16.22 billion by 2034 – a staggering 30.88% CAGR that signals more than market enthusiasm. Research shows a 17-34% probability that cryptographically relevant quantum computers will exist by 2034, climbing to 79% by 2044. But here's what keeps me awake at night: adversaries are already employing "harvest now, decrypt later" strategies, collecting our encrypted data today to unlock tomorrow. For my fellow CTOs and CIOs: the U.S. National Security Memorandum 10 mandates full migration to post-quantum cryptography by 2035, with some agencies required to transition by 2030. This isn't optional. Ninety-five percent of cybersecurity experts rate quantum's threat to current systems as "very high," yet only 25% of organizations are actively addressing this in their risk management strategies. To the brilliant minds entering our industry: this represents the greatest cybersecurity challenge and opportunity of our generation. While quantum computing promises revolutionary advances in drug discovery, optimization, and AI, it simultaneously threatens the cryptographic foundation of our digital world. The demand for quantum-safe solutions will create entirely new career paths and industries. What moves me most is the democratizing potential of this challenge. Whether you're building solutions in Silicon Valley or Lahore, the quantum threat affects us all equally – and so does the opportunity to solve it. Post-quantum cryptography isn't just about surviving disruption; it's about architecting the secure digital infrastructure that will power humanity's next chapter. The countdown has begun. The question isn't whether quantum will break our current security – it's whether we'll be ready when it does.

As an agriculture consultant, it's difficult to limit myself to just one area like permaculture, agroforestry, or market linkages, because the real issues farmers face is often not what they believe them to be. What they describe is usually a symptom, not the root cause. To truly help, I need to look at the entire system—soil, water, inputs, behavior, markets, and climate—as a whole. - A farmer may say, "These fertilizers are not working" but the real issue might be poor soil biology due to years of chemical overuse. - Or they say, "My profits are shrinking," when the underlying problem is market mismatch, post-harvest losses, or a lack of diversification and also high input costs - Sometimes, what looks like a pest issue may be a deeper agroecological imbalance or poor crop planning. Not just this farmers approach for waterlogging, energy efficiency etc as well. They are farmers they don't think of it as separate entities. This exactly why the government schemes fail trying to implement one type of solution to all. Everyone grows same and market collapses. Diversity boom..!!! It's important to have a 360-degree view rather they try to replace traditional ways with software and technology and call it innovation Most so-called "innovations" are often surface-level solutions—apps, dashboards, sensors, platforms—without addressing the deeper, systemic issues that farmers face on the ground. I have seen professional work in the same way, Pest problem? this pesticide. No water? we will develop drought resistant crops in lab. Tech and science are only support system not the final solutions Real Innovation = Ground + Tech + People #AgriConsultant #HolisticFarming #FarmSystemsThinking #RootCauseAnalysis #SustainableFarming #Agroecology #PermacultureIndia #FarmToMarket #SoilHealth #SmartFarmingIndia