Over the years, I have written blogs on user experience, customer experience, innovation, design thinking, agile development, data science, predictive analytics, AI, personalization, brand, business strategy, product management, emotional connection, design, art, culture, leadership life… and other topics. – Enjoy.
I was recently working with a client developing an online resource center for educators. First, we assess their business needs for this project and developed our UX plan. Then we ensured understanding of the market problem we were solving and defined our target audience. Next, we did our competitive analysis and looked at what other
Information architecture (IA) focuses on organizing, structuring, and labeling content in an effective and sustainable way. The goal is to help users find information and complete tasks. The Information Architecture Institute defines information architecture simply: “Information architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something to be understandable.” The purpose of your
Visual appearance is important. Studies have shown that if your product appears professional, customers are more likely to fault themselves for usability issues versus the product. Visual appearance also contributes to the overall aesthetics of your product that create that important emotional connection. It is important to get your visual appearance right. But your brand
Altruistic behavior is common throughout the animal kingdom, particularly in species with complex social structures. For example, vampire bats regularly regurgitate blood and donate it to other members of their group who have failed to feed that night, ensuring they do not starve. In numerous bird species, a breeding pair receives help in raising its
I was having coffee with my good friend, Mark Tomaszewicz, Chief Experience Officer at Bulldog Drummond. Mark was sharing with me this idea that at the intersection of brand promise and brand experience is authenticity. Mark recently wrote a blog about it. What I like about this Venn diagram Mark shared in his blog is how
In today’s experience economy, successful companies don’t stand out because of their efficient production or their better engineering. It is their dedication to understanding their customers and their strong commitment to solving customers’ problems and servicing their needs. Experience Design focuses on the customer problems and needs. Applying human-centered design helps companies become more agile and flexible in their
You may start with a problem or a discovery. You may discover a problem or, in solving a problem, make a discovery. It is rarely, if ever, a linear process of one then the other. There are innovation frameworks, methods and techniques. They help… but innovation is a messy process that includes going to unfamiliar
Lately, I have been hearing a lot talk about design thinking and human-centered design. What are they? How are they different? Are they the same? It reminds me of the old debate around user experience and “usability. You may have missed that one… The usability folks felt that “usability” was a hard science with an
Mental models are psychological representations of real, hypothetical, or imaginary situations. They were first postulated in the late 1800’s by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce but it was the Scottish psychologist, Kenneth Craik, in 1943, who describes mental models as the mind constructs “small-scale models” of reality that it uses to anticipate events, to
Humans are irrational. We think we make rational decisions but science tells us we are incapable of making rational decisions. We cannot make a decision without emotions. It is the emotional part of our brain that informs our rational part to make a decision. And if the feeling is strong enough, we will justify our decisions to
My wife called from the garden to my daughter asking for the time. My daughter replied three fifty (3:50). I immediately thought “why didn’t she say ten to four?” Then I realized that she rarely looks at an analog clock – she probably doesn’t even know what “ten to four” means. Or how about “half
As was the case with the mobile revolution, and the web before that, machine learning is causing us to rethink, restructure, and reconsider what’s possible in virtually every experience we build. At Google, they call this Human-Centered Machine Learning – staying grounded in human needs while solving for them—in ways that are uniquely possible through