Define the Customers’ Workflow and Users’ Tasks

To design user experiences that are easy to use for your customers and users, become familiar with the customers’ workflows and the users’ tasks. When conducting your research, establish a list of users by companies, departments, and roles. The company contact is usually the “customer” and the department contact is usually a manager. In enterprise … Read more

Understand Your Customer in Context of the Market

Researching the customer and user needs The first step in understanding the needs of customers and users is to understand their marketplace. Put the customers and users needs in context of the market, competition, and other customers and users. How does this solution serve its market? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the competitions’ … Read more

Easy to Use for Whom: Defining the Customer and User Experience for Enterprise Software

For enterprise software, the customer is the person or group within the organization who decides whether or not to purchase the solution while the user is the individual or group who operates and/or uses the system. The customer is interested in finding the best way to bring efficiency to their operation such as reducing cycle … Read more

Product Management and Design: Analyze the Requirements and Design the Solution

Product Design conducts an analysis of the market, technology, and competition, in terms of the user experience and interface design, early in the product lifecycle to determine the user interface (UI) design direction. Partnering with Product Management, the Product Design group conducts surveys, focus groups, reviews, and other activities to better understand the market, customer, … Read more

Product Management and Design: Writing Requirements and Validating Solutions

Product Management writes requirements that identify the problems in the marketplace and quantifies opportunities for their solutions. Product Design assists Product Management in validating the solutions. Information Architects or Usability Specialists develop, conduct, and analyze surveys, interviews, and/or observations. The data from these studies helps identify problems and opportunities that are realized in the requirements. … Read more

Develop Visual Designs that Support the Brand and Enhance the Ease of Use

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

Develops Prototypes to Validate Activities, Tasks, and Actions meet Your Customers’ Needs

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

Activity Diagrams and Task Analysis

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

Define Who, Why, What, and How: Roles, Goals, Scenarios, and Activities

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

Understanding Customer Activities

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

Don’t Listen to your Customers!

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

Emotional Design

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