Easy to Use 2.0 Audiobook

You can now listen to the Easy to Use 2.0 audiobook! Here are few things that folks have been saying about Easy to Use 2.0: “It’s refreshing to see the thoughtfulness and design expertise Sean Van Tyne brings to the enterprise software space. It is a technology category that’s ripe for design-led disruption, and this … 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

Agile Develop Success, Sprints, Planning and User Experience

In Agile Development, a “sprint” is one iteration of a continuous development cycle. Within a sprint, planned amount of work has to be completed by the team and made ready for review. During the sprint: No changes are made that would endanger the sprint goal Quality goals do not decrease Sprints are limited to a … Read more

Experience Design, Lean and Agile

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 … Read more

User Story Maps and Wireframes

In Agile, user story maps are a holistic view of your product backlog. A product backlog is a repository of requirements for the releases of the product. The user story map is focused on the user experience target outcomes and identifying the best way to ‘slice’ your product releases by minimal viable product (MVP). A … Read more

UX Maturity Model and Strategy Scorecard

Your products and services are delivering an experience to your customers regardless if you are consciously managing them. A good experience delights customers and generates a steady revenue stream while a poor experience sends customers to the competition and can be the demise of an organization. Savvy organizations understand their experience design maturity, invest in … Read more

How to Get Your UX Team a Seat at the Table: Building UX into Business Competency

I have grown several UX departments from little or nothing to global highly efficient and effective teams. In every case, it was the same – we had to prove ourselves to the decision makers that we were worth investing in. We needed to get a “seat at the table” with the executives team that determined … Read more

Design Thinking, Lean and Agile Better Defining Customer Problems and Solutions

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. In the article, Why Design Thinking is the Future of Management, Stefan Link shares: “Design Thinking helps … Read more

Building the Right Thing, Building it Right, Building it Fast

Markets are changing faster than ever. We are living Moore’s Law. In 1965, Intel co-founder, Gordon Moore, noticed that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since their invention. Moore predicted that this trend will continue into the foreseeable future. Although the pace has slowed (the number of … Read more

Kano Model

A product or service feature will drift over time from a delightful innovation to a basic need. The drift is driven by customer expectations and by the level of performance from competing products. For example mobile phone batteries were originally large and bulky with only a few hours of charge. Over time we have come … Read more

Crafting Experiences for The Enterprise

In 2007, I wrote an article for Pragmatic Marketer magazine entitled “Easy to Use for Whom: Defining the Customer and User Experience for Enterprise Software.” I opened the article with: “Enterprise software is only easy to use if the customers and users think it is easy to use. To determine “ease of use,” first understand … Read more