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
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
Once you’re confident you understand various customers’ workflow, activities, and tasks, it’s time to develop visual design—color scheme, fonts, iconography, branding, and all graphic elements. Visual designers develop the visual design elements that support the company’s brand and enhance the ease of task completion and efficiency. Medium-fidelity prototypes are developed based on wireframes and visual … Read more
Product designers have tools they use to define activities, tasks, actions, and operations such as activity diagrams, wireframes, and prototypes. Product Design develops prototypes to elicit customer feedback to validate the solutions activities, tasks, and actions meet their needs. Wireframes are a quick and easy way to prototype a design for feedback. Wireframes are a … Read more
Product designers have tools they use to define activities, tasks, actions, and operations such as activity diagrams, wireframes, and prototypes. Activity diagrams divide the activities into tasks needed to complete the user’s objective. A task is a unit of work. The task itself may be a single step in the process or multiple steps or … Read more
The product manager must have a concise vision for the product they can clearly articulate to the product designers. Put the customers and users activities in context of the market problem the solution is solving. Markets are made up of segments. We must be able to define our market segmentations in terms of their needs … Read more
Dr. Donald Norman has suggested a hierarchical structure of activities, tasks, actions, and operations to better understand our customers’ interactions with solutions. In this model, activities are comprised of tasks, which are comprised of actions, and actions are made up of operations. This “activity centered” philosophy is focused on the activity—not the person. If a … Read more
OK, that got your attention… Sometimes the best way to satisfy a customer’s need is to ignore their suggestions. Customers have ideas about incremental improvements to their workflow, but if we develop something that is truly innovative, our ideas probably won’t make sense to existing customers. Sometimes when we solve a market problem, our solution … Read more
Enterprise feedback management (EFM) is an integrated approach to the management of all forms of feedback available to an organization. EFM solutions centralize key demographic and attitudinal data about respondents, targeted subsets, and integrate feedback data to and from CRM, HRIS and other systems EFM consists of data collection, analysis and reporting. EFM solutions provide … Read more
I once had a client that was rolling out their next generation behavioral targeting enterprise solution to their market and we needed to understand how the different market segments were going to use it… so we created customer profiles. We divided their customers into three categories: Those who used their solution strategically; those who used … Read more