Sean Van Tyne 
I was recently asked by Good Experience to present a webinar on Product Design: Bridging the Gap between Product Management & Development, an article I wrote for Pragmatic Marketer magazine. Here it is (basically)… Product Design is the bridge between Product Management and Product Development. Product Management quantifies the problems, writes requirements, and validates the … Read more
Each perspective of the Balance Scorecard includes objectives, measures of those objectives, target values for those measures, and initiatives, as follows: objectives—the major objectives a company must achieve—for example, profitable growth measures—the observable parameters a company uses to measure its progress toward reaching its objectives. For example, a company might measure its progress toward the … Read more
With the Balance Scorecard system, an organization can align and manage its key corporate objectives. The User Experience Balance Scorecard maps the user experience process and skills to customer satisfaction and financial growth. At a high level, a User Experience Balance Scorecard might look something like that shown in Figure 2. Figure 2—A high-level User … Read more
Customers have experiences with an organization’s products and services regardless of whether the organization is consciously managing them. A good user experience delights customers—increasing adoption, retention, loyalty, and, most important, revenue. And a poor user experience discourages customers from using a product or service and drives them to the competition—eventually, making a product offering unviable. … Read more
It is essential to put your design solutions into the context of the market problems they solve, the business objectives they support, and the customer and user needs they meet. Using a “scorecard” helps organizations balance their strategic objectives across various perspectives such as Financial, Customer, Processes, etc. Each perspective of a scorecard can include … Read more
Once you’re confident you understand various customers’ workflow, activities, and tasks, it’s time to develop visual design—color scheme, fonts, iconography, branding, and all graphic elements. Visual designers develop the visual design elements that support the company’s brand and enhance the ease of task completion and efficiency. Medium-fidelity prototypes are developed based on wireframes and visual … Read more
Product designers have tools they use to define activities, tasks, actions, and operations such as activity diagrams, wireframes, and prototypes. Product Design develops prototypes to elicit customer feedback to validate the solutions activities, tasks, and actions meet their needs. Wireframes are a quick and easy way to prototype a design for feedback. Wireframes are a … Read more
Product designers have tools they use to define activities, tasks, actions, and operations such as activity diagrams, wireframes, and prototypes. Activity diagrams divide the activities into tasks needed to complete the user’s objective. A task is a unit of work. The task itself may be a single step in the process or multiple steps or … Read more
The product manager must have a concise vision for the product they can clearly articulate to the product designers. Put the customers and users activities in context of the market problem the solution is solving. Markets are made up of segments. We must be able to define our market segmentations in terms of their needs … Read more
Dr. Donald Norman has suggested a hierarchical structure of activities, tasks, actions, and operations to better understand our customers’ interactions with solutions. In this model, activities are comprised of tasks, which are comprised of actions, and actions are made up of operations. This “activity centered” philosophy is focused on the activity—not the person. If a … Read more
OK, that got your attention… Sometimes the best way to satisfy a customer’s need is to ignore their suggestions. Customers have ideas about incremental improvements to their workflow, but if we develop something that is truly innovative, our ideas probably won’t make sense to existing customers. Sometimes when we solve a market problem, our solution … Read more
Emotions have a crucial role in our ability to understand the world. Studies have shown that an object that “pleases” us appears to be more effective. This is due to the affinity we feel for an object that appeals to us – an emotional connection. In his book Emotional Design, Dr. Donald Norman proposes a … Read more