An Experience is More Than What it Looks Like

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 … 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

10 Tips to Increase Website Homepage Conversion

I started developing website in the 1990’s – HTML 1, before CSS, basic JavaScript and the beginning of the dot com boom. Now there is HTML 5, CSS 3 and all sorts of libraries and frameworks to create sophisticated websites. One thing hasn’t change about websites – they still need to be easy to use. … Read more

Form Design Best Practices and Guidelines

Every day, we fill out forms. At the office to get our work done and at home to take care of our domestic needs. Forms are the lifeblood of digital information sharing. A couple of excellent guidelines on forms: Luke Wroblewski’s Web Form Design Best Practices shares guidelines on input fields, input labels, validation, feedback, … Read more

Before You Write Your Requirements, Create a Prototype

Prototype your ideas before you develop them. Use prototypes to solicit feedbacks from subject matter experts to ensure you are solving the right problem, to inform stakeholders, get feedback from your customers, and collaborate with development. Before you write your requirements, create a “prototype.” This could be a sketch – or sketches –  on a … 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

Death of the Password with Better Authentication Design

I recently attended Jared Spool’s presentation “Insecure & Unintuitive: How We Need to Fix the UX of Security.” If you haven’t heard Jared speak then I recommend that you do. Jared is both highly entertaining and highly informative. In this presentation, Jared shared how organizations are losing millions of dollars because people don’t remember their … Read more

Experience Design Principles for Machine Learning

I find myself going back to Fabien Girardin’s excellent article, Experience Design in the Machine Learning Era, and mining it for more gold. Fabien shares: “Nowadays, the design of many digital services does not only rely on data manipulation and information design but also on systems that learn from their users. If you would open the … Read more

Sometimes You Need to Show the Seams: Ubiquitous, Invisible and Seamless to Seamful Design

Mark Weiser gave us the concepts of ubiquitous and invisible computing.  Ubiquitous – available to us anytime and everywhere – and Invisible – we don’t see it and it doesn’t get in our way of completing our task at hand. Nowadays, we expect our mobile phones, wearables, home systems, etc… to be ubiquitous and invisible – … Read more

Fogg’s Seven Strategies to Influence Behavior in Experience Design

According to Dr. BJ Fogg, founder of the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University and the Fogg Behavioral Model, persuasive technology uses seven strategies to influence behavior: Reduction – Simplify the task the user is trying to do. Tunneling – A step-by-step sequence of activities that guides 
the user through the behavior. Tailoring – Provide feedback … Read more

Experience Design, Machine Learning and the Platinum Rule

The Golden Rule or law of reciprocity is the principle of treating others as one would wish to be treated. It is a maxim of altruism seen in many religions and cultures. Simply stated, “One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.” As a child, I learned it as “Do onto others as you would want them to do … Read more

Group Personas

In some cases, you may only need to define a limited set of primary and secondary personas. It may be important to make the distinction between your buyer, user and influencer personas. But as you think through your scenarios, if you find groups of personas interacting with the environment or with other personas, you may … Read more