Dennis Cheatham – Dennis Cheatham's research, teaching, and portfolio website.

Design isn't about design.
It's about the person's experience.

I examine the interplay between contexts, people, and design, people at an experiential level. Through getting to know people groups via fieldwork and facilitating the co-creation of design interventions, my work benefits communities while producing a clearer understanding of how people construct meaning by studying the solutions they create.

My Work

I seek answers to three questions.

Interpreting Experience Design Scenes

Scenes Question

Current Post

Beyond UX: Designing for Complete Experiences

April 10, 2020

Beyond UX: Designing for Complete Experiences

Advancing People Driven Design

People Driven Question

Current Post

Living Values: Researching and Designing End-of-Life Decision-making with People who are Marginalized

January 11, 2019

Living Values: Researching and Designing End-of-Life Decision-making with People who are Marginalized

Developing Experience Designers

Xd Edu Question

Current Post

Mastery Rules: One Point Rubrics for Design Education

March 26, 2020

Mastery Rules: One Point Rubrics for Design Education

Stories

Thoughts & Updates

Posts on a variety of topics and updates about my work. Off-the-cuff, on-the-fly, top-of-mind, and other hyphenated kinds of thinking.

Post

a diagram of boxes and their relationships

Learning, Understanding, and Applying Research and Design for Meaningful Experiences

June 5, 2020

Learning, Understanding, and Applying Research and Design for Meaningful Experiences

Post

Design and Nielsen: Behind My Tweet and New York Times Interview

February 2, 2016

How the Nielsen TV Viewing Diary connects to design and the tweet that got my story in the New York Times.

data gathering
design research
human behavior
human-centered design
Interview
new york times
Publishing
qualitative methods
quantitative methods
surveys
television

Design and Nielsen: Behind My Tweet and New York Times Interview

Post

Health Topics Can Be Funny

March 24, 2015

How you present a message about health is as important as the content, itself. Dr. Hamblin's video series "If Our Bodies Could Talk" does both well.

funny
health
humor
video

Health Topics Can Be Funny

Project Spotlight

Design Workbench

The Design Workbench website showcases ongoing design research projects. It houses tutorials and articles to help readers learn more about becoming an experience-centered designer. It also features a podcast that introduces listeners to critical experience-centered design concepts.

Design's impact on people and their communities is best understood when seen in action. I created the Design Workbench website to reveal how to develop useful, usable, and desirable products, services, and systems and what happens when these outcomes succeed or miss the mark.

These research projects are currently on the workbench.

Living Values

Making advance care planning relevant and accessible for people in underserved communities.

Project Site

Rewarding Risk

Creating learning experiences that encourage risk-taking and exploration that are necessary for innovation.

Project Site

Design Workbench Podcast

How do designers create apps people love or intuitive services that anticipate peoples' needs? The Design Workbench podcast demystifies how experience-centered design works and what goes into creating outcomes that exceed peoples' expectations.

The Design Workbench podcast is coming soon!

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Design Workbench: Learn

Explore over fifty pages of tutorials, resources, and materials on design research, strategy, and production such as the ones listed below.

Design Foundations

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Design Research

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Design Process

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Design is all around. If you look closely, you'll notice how a product's style or a service's steps were designed to create experiences. Observed posts reveal the subtle ways apps, services, and items in the wild make life easier for people and sometimes even create delight.

Below are the most recent Observed posts. See more at Design Workbench.

Scent names: evidence that people want to customize their experience. #experiencedesign #wkbnch (For the record, I have never smelled a Girlfriend Night.)
on December 12, 2021 at 9:43 pm
A game that’s pre-set invites play. Want people to play your game (or use your design)? Make it easy to start. #experiencedesign #wkbnch
on December 4, 2021 at 11:58 am
Clear. Usable. @lego building instructions can teach designers a lot about depicting sequences. #wkbnch
on November 21, 2021 at 4:36 pm

Project Spotlight

Aspects of Experiences for Design

For an app or health clinic to deliver a fantastic experience, the product's features must match the experiencer—the person using the design. The challenge facing designers who care about these experiences is deciphering what parts of a person's physical and emotional makeup should drive those features.

A Vocabulary for Complete Design Experiences Designers must work beyond typical user experience to design for relevant and meaningful experiences. AoE4D is a practical framework that helps design teams examine aspects of experiences that lead to innovative outcomes.

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