Brendan McNulty

That’s a lot of reading especially since the chap below (Donald Broadbent) did some pioneering work on user centred design in the 60’s. We believe that understanding users and building technology products that help them is a strict coda with frameworks that need to be adhered to, but it wasn’t even being studied in universities […]

Everyone has cool ideas they think should work. And every Google window (and chat GPT) will give you best practises to implement. It’s much harder to listen to your customers and deeply understand their needs and experiences. I did a focus group with some kids and a batch of usability testing with the company’s own […]

I’m not directly targeting you, but it’s a problem that everyone has. Back on the Serengeti (🦓 🦁 🐒 ) hundreds of thousands of years ago we developed biases to allow us mental shortcuts to make decisions before we were munched by a leopard.These are less useful now when we want to discuss how to […]

He is the documentary filmmaker we all deserve; German, says mad stuff that speaks to a potential deeper truth and understands and communicates the human experience in a captivating way. He talks about “ecstatic truth; a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual,” including untruths that “make some essence of the […]

It’s only Thursday, so I shouldn’t be preaching, however…It’s really easy to have an assumption and look for corroboration to back it up. We think we’ve found an insight and we cherry pick data to substantiate what we think. Data doesn’t lie, but our interpretation of it easy to be misled. We don’t want to […]

Many years ago I worked on Monopoly as an online game (and it was even distributed on a CD-ROM, remember them kids 💿 ?)Hasbro were a giant pain in the ass about every decision, and coming from a swift moving startup environment I thought it was painful.I read today that Hasbro has made $3BN on […]

This is not my view of hashtag#AI but I can understand that people can feel disillusioned by the digital hype cycle. Even if this is just the flash in the pan portion of the hype cycle it’s still going to have an impact on the future.My vote: carry on playing, find ways that it fits […]

I’m a research nerd. From behavioural stuff to attitudinal, qualitative or quantitative, I’m fascinated by it. Understanding how your customer ticks creates a feedback loop that continuously improves your product and your understanding. In 2024 you don’t really have too many excuses for not understanding a customer. The costs are low, the technology is available […]

I was a little out of my depth ( 😁 ) with all of the dev nerds at the Machine Learning Society, but it was interesting people discussing hard topics rather than dumbing it down. Two things that I’ll take with me:Axel Tidemann talked about the machine learning approach and stack at takealot.com. Really interesting […]

In that case you’re apparently looking good according to a fresh internet statistic 🔢 . Unfortunately comparing your conversion rate to a benchmark isn’t a worthwhile discussion. One of the most frequent questions I’ll get is whether someone’s conversion rate is good. There isn’t a great answer to this, as there are too many externalities:– […]