articles

Recently, I visited the Van Gogh exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. As I stood facing his portraits and landscapes, I was reminded of an essay by a philosopher I had read long ago.  That one essay focused on a simple painting of “Pair of Shoes” by Van Gogh. Philosopher Martin Heidegger once wrote that these shoes are not […]

As UX researchers specializing in medical devices, we often receive questions from manufacturers outside Japan who are looking to enter the Japanese market. One of the most common is:   “How should we recruit participants for a usability evaluation in Japan?”  While you might be familiar with established practices for usability testing in the U.S. and Europe, […]

What is Required to Market a Medical Device in Japan?  If your company is planning to introduce a medical device to the Japanese market, you may be asking questions such as:  In recent years, the PMDA has placed a clearer and stricter emphasis on usability engineering. They now require manufacturers to demonstrate compliance with JIS T 62366-1:2022, which […]

PMDA’s overall HFE mindset is aligned with international regulatory frameworks, but expectations in certain areas can differ. In particular, PMDA takes a distinct approach to topics such as sample size determination and test environment considerations. This guide outlines key points based on the implementation of JIS T 62366-1:2022 and current PMDA expectations.  Sample Size  PMDA does not […]

Fieldwork in Japan often looks straightforward on paper, but projects can quietly lose quality through mistranslated stimuli, over-tight recruitment criteria, or session designs that ignore local communication patterns. Executing high-quality user research in Japan requires careful planning and awareness of local operational and cultural factors. This guide outlines our proven workflow across three phases:  Pre-Fieldwork Preparation […]

Today, I’d like to begin this blog with a simple question.  What does “the best user experience” mean to you?  If an answer came to mind right away, it’s probably because that experience moved you so deeply that it engraved itself into your memory. And yet, the more powerful an experience is, the harder it often becomes to explain why it […]

As a UX researcher, I’m trained to observe the subtle ways people interact with the world. Within the last few years, a fascinating pattern has emerged among my peers, friends, and in my own digital life. It’s a four-letter code that has become a new kind of language: MBTI*.  * Short for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a self-reported questionnaire that assigns people to one of 16 […]

One-on-one in-depth user interviews may be the bread and butter of many UX researchers, but group interviews and workshops create a unique opportunity of observable collaboration, negotiation, and debate. When facilitated well, these sessions become living laboratories where one person’s idea can collide or react with another’s, creating new and unexpected findings. The key is to use group interaction itself as a source of data. Achieving this requires a thoughtful […]

In UX design and research, we frequently deal with the concept of time. When we create customer journey maps or refer to frameworks proposed in the “User Experience White Paper” (Roto et al., 2011), we often divide experiences into phases such as “before use,” “during use,” and “after use.” Breaking complex phenomena into manageable phases can be extremely useful in day-to-day […]

The Cashless Paradox  For any global visitor, Japan has long been a land of fascinating contradictions: a nation of futuristic bullet trains and talking toilets that, until very recently, ran on physical cash. As UX researchers in Tokyo, we’ve had a front-row seat to the dramatic unraveling of this very paradox.  If we turn the clock back just seven […]