People do not see what they are actually doing until someone shows them. Alexander Belyshkin shows them. What changes is who he shows it to.
First, in the laboratory
It began as a research question: how do people picture their own work at a computer, and how far is that picture from what they do?
Laboratory of Work Psychology
Faculty of Psychology, Moscow State University. He worked there as a researcher in the late 1990s, studying how different kinds of users understand what they are doing at a computer.
- What he published there. The 1997 research is in Russian.
- How different kinds of users picture their work with a computer Graduate research, 1997.
- Third European Summer School on New Information Technology and Work Psychology Psychological Journal, October 1997.
- User’ Categories and Perceptual Difference of a Related Computer Tasks Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta, No. 3, 2000.
Then, to makers
The people who build a product know how it is meant to be used. They rarely see how it is used. He took the question out of the laboratory, and for more than twenty years his work was to put the second in front of them.
Usethics
He founded the company in 2001 and led it for more than twenty years. It was the first studio in Russia to do nothing but usability: watching real people use a product, and bringing what it saw back to the people who made it. Thousands of projects went through it, and the method was his.
- What he wrote in those years. Three are translated in full here; the others link to the Russian originals.
- Usability in Russia A chapter in Global Usability, edited by Ian Douglas and Zhengjie Liu. Springer, 2011, pp. 273–284. In English.
- Testing interfaces With Alexey Lukutin. itWeek, 2002.
- The user is always right Eduard Proydakov’s interview with Rolf Molich for PC Week, 2004; Alexander Belyshkin took part.
- Interface design as part of writing the requirements specification With Vlad Golovach. 2003.
- A user interface checklist With Vlad Golovach.
- Four times inadequate: typical interface problems of Russian software and how to prevent them Usethics blog.
- How interruptions affect people working at a PC With Ivan Burmistrov. Usethics blog.
- Comparative usability testing of products that differ in functional power Usethics blog.
- A new life for the scrollbar With Ekaterina Filatova and Ivan Boyko.
Then, to anyone
The same gap runs through a single person: what you feel you did, and what you did. So he started building instruments that hand your own result back to you, at once and in numbers.
Play of Time
A stopwatch to stop at exactly three seconds. The game happens in your head; the app only shows you the result.
Read Aloud
Read an English book aloud and see, word by word, how it actually came out.
Now, to himself
He runs the same practice on himself, daily, and publishes what comes out of it.
Question of the Day
One new question every day. On Telegram.
The Government Inspector
Gogol’s play, all five acts, in his own voice. In Russian.
- Accumulator On Telegram.
- English but Simple On Reddit.
- Photo Session