Winning in the Marketplace: Deciding How Much User Experience Effort Does It Take

You need to decide how much user research, design, and usability testing you can afford. This depends on your competitive market, business objectives, and release cycles. During the early phases of a product development lifecycle, activities include conducting market, customer, and competitive user research. User research may include surveys, focus groups, interviews, and contextual inquiries. … Read more

Winning in the Marketplace with Usability Testing

Once you have validated that your product’s overall workflow meets customer and user needs, do usability testing to evaluate individual tasks to ensure they are easy to complete. Usability evaluation assesses the degree to which users can operate a system and their efficiency and satisfaction when using the system. Such evaluations validate that tasks are … Read more

Reviewing Designs with Your Customers is the Key to Designing Easy-to-use Solutions

Developing prototypes and reviewing them with target customers and users is key to designing easy-to-use solutions. You must spend some time validating workflow, navigation, information grouping, information hierarchy, terminology, labels, and interactions to ensure they meet the needs of the market and your users. Your understanding of various customers’ needs, users’ workflows, and content overlaps … Read more

Winning in the Marketplace with User Experience Design

During User Experience (UX) design, develop diagrams of various users’ workflows, noting where they are similar or different. Next, based on your findings, group your customer and user types by similar roles, and create profiles or personas that synthesize users’ skills, patterns, and goals to better understand their needs. Companies in mature markets may not … Read more

Winning in the Marketplace with Market and User Research

market research

The first step in developing solutions that are easy to use is understanding customer and user needs within the context of the market and existing competition. It takes market and user research to: define the problem your product must solve and design an optimal solution understand the strengths and weaknesses of competitors’ solutions in comparison … Read more

How Much User Experience Effort Does It Take for Large Versus Small-to-Medium Companies

Many large technology companies like Apple have invested heavily in user experience for many years. Successful companies have well-established UX departments and have set the standard for ease of use. Such companies have defined many aspects of the user-centered design process we follow today. These companies have the capital to make big investments in user … Read more

Winning in the Marketplace: How Much User Experience Effort Does It Take?

User experience encompasses all aspects of users’ interactions with a company, its services, and its products. Prioritizing user advocacy from the beginning of a product design process puts users at the center of the process and ensures their needs are foremost in all UX design decisions. To meet your customers’ real needs and deliver simple, … Read more

Support Corporate Strategy Through Customer Experience Design

Only with a thorough understanding of your customers’ and users’ needs can you design easy-to-use enterprise software solutions. Early research and validation of those needs reduces cycle time in defining requirements. More thorough user interface designs— prototypes and specifications— reduces cycle time in development and testing. Easy-to-use enterprise software solutions reduce training and support costs, … Read more

Conduct Usability Evaluations to Ensure Your Solution is Easy to Use

Once you have validated the workflow meets the customer and user needs, evaluate the tasks to ensure that they are easy to complete. Usability evaluation assesses the degree to which the system can be operated by its users, the efficiency of the solution and satisfaction. These evaluations validate that the tasks are easy to complete—a … Read more

Develop the Visual and Interaction Design in Context of Your Customers’ Workflow

Once you’re confident that you understand your various customers’ workflow and content, it’s time to develop the visual design—color scheme, fonts, iconography, branding, and all graphic elements. Work closely with the visual designer or visual design team to ensure that the visual design elements support the company’s brand and enhance the ease of use of … Read more

Validate Your User Experience Designs with Your Customers and Users

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 the Customer and User Experience

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