10 Tips for UX Success from Agile Practitioners

Earlier this year, the Nielsen Norman Group asked Agile practitioners at a UX conference to share tips that have contributed to the success of their Agile projects. They received 125 responses from professionals that worked in various-size companies and held different job responsibilities, ranging from UX designers and developers to product owners and project managers. Here are … Read more

Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation

Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation is one of the four statements of the Agile Manifesto. If you are a small software company or you are working in a JAD with your customers, then customer collaboration is the actual customer who is purchasing your solution. If you are large organization, the customer may be your internal customer … Read more

User Experience Documentation Needs to be Agile

Recently, I was interviewed by Portofino Media, Topics for Agile Innovation, Exploring the Agile User Experience Journey. In this interview, Armond Merhabian and I focus on UX in context of the Agile Manifesto. In recent blogs, I have covered UX and other parts of the manifesto like Individuals and Interactions Over Process and Tools and … Read more

Easy to Use: Icons

Ever visit a website or store or see a sign in a public space that you had no idea what the icon meant? There are a lot of reasons for that. One, of course is the ethnocentric aspect – we know what we know based on our prior experiences. So, if the image of the … Read more

UX Boot Camp Workshop Workbooks

One of the best parts of the UX Boot Camps are the workshops – and the workbooks. There are several workshops throughout the day at a boot camp. The workshops are hands-on activities where we get to practice what we have just learned and apply it to our organization – all captured in the workbook. … Read more

User Experience is not what you think it is

UI is not UX   Usability is not UX   Design is not UX User experience encompasses all aspects of your end-user’s interaction with your company’s brand, products and services. To learn more about what User Experience is not and is, please join us at the UX Boot Camp for Product Managers in Tustin, California, … Read more

The Power of Product Thinking

In his blog post Why Product Thinking is the next big thing in UX Design: Life’s too short to build something nobody wants… Nikkel Blaase shares: “When thinking of User Experience, we often think of a simple, beautiful, and easy to use feature-set of a product, that makes the user’s life easier. But as a … Read more

What do Product Managers need to know about User Experience?

Let me start with “What do Product Managers need to know about Product Management.” In 1931 at Proctor & Gamble, Neil McElroy wrote a memo that proposed the idea of a “brand man” — an employee to manage a specific product rather than serving a traditional business role. Other organizations adopted brand management and the … Read more

Take Part in Actuation Consulting 5th Annual Study of Product Teams

These annual ongoing studies share information that is meaningful to executives of product organizations in general and product executives in particular. Once the survey is complete, the data is shared with an independent statistician who conducts regression analysis. The result of this regression analysis are factors that are highly correlated with high performance on product … Read more

Small Companies can Deliver Great Experiences just like Apple

memorable experiences

Apple and Amazon started as small companies – a few people in a garage. Steve Jobs, one of the co-founders of Apple and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, focused on delivering great experience from day one. They instilled this in their companies DNA and you can see it the results. Small companies can do … Read more

System Response Time and Feedback Guidelines

  There is no industry standard for application response time1. How long someone is willing to wait is only relevant in the context of how important the task is to them. For example, how long someone is willing to wait to view their family’s online photo album versus how long they are willing to wait … Read more

Emotion and the Customer Experience go Hand-in-Hand

memorable experiences

“No purchase is void of emotion. Brands have spent millions attempting to connect positive feelings to a product… Increasingly, brands are striving to bring emotion beyond slogans and packaging and incorporate it into the entire customer experience.” according to Jason Wesbecher, CMO of Mattersight in a recent Huffington Post blog. As best-selling author and psychologist … Read more