Three Building Blocks to Creating a Great Customer Experience

CX Analytics

In ten years of helping more than 900 companies design and execute enterprise-wide customer-experience programs, the McKinsey Company have a formula that they have seen 15 to 20 percent increases in sales conversion rates, 20 to 50 percent declines in service costs, and 10 to 20 percent improvement in customer satisfaction. The formula has specific … Read more

My Favorite Tools in My Designer Toolkit

favorite design thinking tool

“Design Thinking is a human centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success” -Tim Brown I have been an artist, teacher, technologist, designer and entrepreneur. Everything I have done has been accomplished through design thinking. Not intentionally … Read more

Iterative Reviews and Incremental Revisions in Agile Human Centered Design

I love the Agile development process. I love that there are short development cycles to pivot quickly in these ever-changing markets we are in; continuous reviews with stakeholder to ensure we are delivering the right business value or course correct if needed; and the use of stories to keep the focus on the people who … Read more

Agile Design Thinking Sprint Planning

The highest priority of Agile Development is to “Satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” Agile Development advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continual improvement, and it encourages rapid and flexible response to change. Agile development achieves these goals through short development cycles called “sprints.” The short time frame … Read more

Contextual Inquiry

Contextual inquiry is a semi-structured observational and interview (inquiry) method to understand how and why a prospect or customers uses (existing) or may use (prototype) your solution in the environment that they use it (context). This could be using an appliance in a kitchen, a tool on the shop floor, a device in a lab, … Read more

Fail Fast, Succeed Faster

“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” – Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft “Early success is a terrible teacher. You’re essentially being rewarded for a lack of preparation, so when you find yourself in a situation where you must prepare, you can’t do it. You don’t know how.” … Read more

Disagreements

It is okay to disagree with me.You wouldn’t be the first.I sometimes disagree with myself. A disagreement is an opportunity to explore.And I love to explore. If you are right and I am wrong,Then I learn something that was true that I didn’t know.And I value truth above most all things. Thank you.

The Creative Process

According to some of the latest theories on creativity (componential theory), creativity is composed of three components: task motivation, domain-relevant skills, and creativity-relevant processes. Motivation is often intrinsic, though it is for some people, or some of the time, extrinsic as well. Domain-relevant skills are often technical (e.g., knowing how to conduct research, for a … Read more

Test Your Riskiest Assumptions First

How do you know you’re making the right bets with your ideas? Which bets do your ideas hinge on? These are our riskiest assumptions. They need to be tested before you spend your valuable time and money. With the ‘problem’ in mind, map out the customer journey to identify the riskiest assumption. Armed with a … Read more

It’s Really a Riskiest Assumption Test, Not a Minimal Viable Product

“There is a flaw at the heart of the term Minimum Viable Product: it’s not a product. It’s a way of testing whether you’ve found a problem worth solving. A way to reduce risk and quickly test your biggest assumption. Instead of building an MVP identify your Riskiest Assumption and Test it.” – Rik Higham, … Read more

UX Design Creating Transparency and Trust for Machine Learning

How we make machine learning transparent to our customers is one of the great design challenges of our time—and a very necessary one. Machine learning refers to different kinds of algorithms that learn from inputs like human interaction or data and create evolving feedback over time from that input. It can use preexisting data to … Read more