How do you win the attention of your audience and create content they actually care about? It happens when you take the time to understand and take on their thoughts, feelings and motivations as your own; it happens through empathy. Empathy mapping is an effective way to tap into the head and heart of your … Read more
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
One of the questions that I get all the time is “What is the best Designer to Developer ratio?” As you can imagine, this can vary depending on marketplace and business goals. If you developing an engineering tool for engineers then your engineers who are developing it probably have a good idea of who is … Read more
Human-Centered Design (HCD), as the name implies, is designing solutions around people. HCD involves the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process by observing the problems within context, brainstorming, conceptualizing, developing, and implementing a solution. It is the process that innovators like Apple and IDEO follow. In this process, you first need to clearly define the problem then … Read more
The term “Lean” was first coined by John Krafcik in his 1988 article, “Triumph of the Lean Production System” based on his experience as a quality engineer in the Toyota-GM NUMMI joint venture in California. Adapting the principles from Lean manufacturing, Mary & Tom Poppendieck wrote Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit (May 18, 2003). … Read more
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
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
The best product development experiences I have had have been when the Product, Design and Development work together. One experience that comes to mind, is when the Product Manager, Development Manager and myself were working on a solution for a new market. We visited our main prospect, the largest organization in this market, with a … Read more
Easy to Use was a good book. It covered much of what I have learned over my many years of creating great user experiences with agile development for enterprise software. But there were a few more things that I that I wanted to say. Easy to Use 2.0 covers new topics like user experience myths and … Read more
Ten years ago, I wrote in “Product Design: Bridging the Gap Between Product Management & Development” for Pragmatic Marketer that: “Personas are a stand-in for a unique group of people who share common goals. They are fictional representatives—archetypes based on the users’ behaviors, attitudes, and goals.” The concepts of a persona have been around for … Read more