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
A common misconception is that a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) consists of the minimum set of features deemed necessary for a working software product, with the goal of bringing it to market quickly. This is incorrect as there is an over-emphasis on speedy delivery and time to market, as opposed to focusing on customer and … Read more
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 … Read more
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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