When validating your new idea to the market, educate your customers so they can put your solution in a new context. This paradigm shift for the customer may not come easy and they may not immediately understand the value of your solution—especially if you can’t put it in context for them. Being able to put … Read more
Designing a user experience may be easy to you, but remember that customers and users don’t know what they specifically want in a solution. They know that they want efficient, effective solutions and they have ideas about how to improve the workflow, but it is up to the software solution provider to bridge the gap … Read more
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
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 Design writes specifications from which Product Development builds the actual software solution. Product Management writes market requirements, Product Design writes UI specifications of the user behavior, branding, and common look-and-feel and Development writes system specifications for the development of the user interface. Wireframes, use cases, and/or a prototype should be evaluated with the customers’ … Read more
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 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
Product Management identifies problems in the marketplace, conducts analysis, and quantifies opportunities for solutions to the problems. Product Management develops a better understanding of the market, customers, and the customers’ end-users, to create Buyer and User Personas. Personas are a stand-in for a unique group of people who share common goals. They are fictional representatives—archetypes … Read more
I was recently asked by Good Experience to present a webinar on Product Design: Bridging the Gap between Product Management & Development, an article I wrote for Pragmatic Marketer magazine. Here it is (basically)… Product Design is the bridge between Product Management and Product Development. Product Management quantifies the problems, writes requirements, and validates the … Read more