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In a previous life, I was a Professional Writing major and part-time journalist. I contributed to my school's student newspaper, as well as the faculty and staff newspaper, and almost every week for two years, I wrote an arts column for the Pittsburgh City Paper - Western PA's leading alternative newsweekly [read my old clips].

In part one of this series, we examined some of the more problematic personality traits user researchers are likely to encounter in their work. Now that we've seen how individual personalities can put a damper on your day; let's explore some ways to overcome the problems inherent to each.

UX researchers are exposed to a broad cross-section of people and personalities, especially when it comes to conducting user tests. Frequently, the people we encounter are willing, helpful participants to the research process - but what happens when respondents aren't so willing or helpful?

The BBC has a pretty innovative design practice. Bad pictures, good read.

I like this comment about traditional prototyping: "This is all well and good, yet the tools employed - Axure, Flash, paper mockups - are inherently fake, and therefore fail to test the most important mechanic; how people interact with actual content. Worse still, they are throwaway deliverables; expensive to create, but contributing nothing to the actual development effort required to create the live site."