Kano Model

A product or service feature will drift over time from a delightful innovation to a basic need. The drift is driven by customer expectations and by the level of performance from competing products. For example mobile phone batteries were originally large and bulky with only a few hours of charge. Over time we have come … Read more

Many Ways to Think About Your Personas

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

Group Personas

In some cases, you may only need to define a limited set of primary and secondary personas. It may be important to make the distinction between your buyer, user and influencer personas. But as you think through your scenarios, if you find groups of personas interacting with the environment or with other personas, you may … Read more

My Favorite Toy and Design Thinking

My favorite toy as a child was a broken single reflex camera. It served as everything from my Star Trek tricorder to a spaceship for my little toy men. My parents would have never guessed it. I wouldn’t have guessed it either. But if my parents had observed my play and asked me a few … Read more

Minimum Desirable Product

Andrew Chen shares in Minimum Desirable Product: “a business-driven company might try to assess viability upfront, thinking about metrics and revenue and market sizes. A feasibility (engineering) oriented organization might try to pick a super hard technology first (P2P! Mapreduce! Search!), then try to build a business around it. And a desirability-focused team might focus … Read more

Design Sprints with Sean Van Tyne on Portofino Media

I joined host, Armond Merhabian, and co-host, Daniel Spencer, to discuss how Design Sprints can accelerate Product discovery and development. We discussed how Design Sprints take the five stages of Design Thinking and do them in five days. This is not done in the Development phase, but earlier in the Portfolio phase, to determine if … Read more

Jeanne Bliss’s Five CX Competencies Transform Your Experience

Jeanne Bliss shares with us in her post Five CX Competencies Transform Your Experience: CUSTOMERS AS ASSETS Your focus is to get leaders to make a defining performance metric – the growth or loss of your customer base. The purpose is to shift to a simple understanding – knowing what customers actually did to impact … Read more

Creativity and Innovation

There is a world of techniques, methods and process that generate ideas (creativity) and convert those ideas into reality (innovation). They are “tools in a tool box” with each having its strength and weakness for solving a variety of problems. Mycoted provides a wiki of creative and innovative techniques that breaks these down into five … Read more

Minimum Viable Product

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) center around the business perspective. It asks the question “what is the minimum product I have to build to figure out whether I have a business?” You might do that from testing signups on landing pages or putting up price points and collecting payment information to helps assess the true … Read more

Persona Walkthrough

The other day I was helping a good friend and colleague with a “persona walkthrough.” A persona walkthrough is when you “walkthrough” your experience assuming the role of the persona. In this case, we were walking through an online experience. We started with a persona named Sally. Sally is a “Soccer Mom” – she is … Read more

Do You Have the Right User Experience Strategy and are You Spending Your UX Dollars Wisely?

Forrester Research, research has shown that 70% of projects fail due to lack of user experience and every dollar invested in UX brings 100 dollars in return. So how do you ensure that your organization doesn’t fail at user experience and are spending your dollars wisely? Are you familiar with Balanced Scorecard? Balanced Scorecard is … Read more

How to Win I-Want-To-Buy Moments

In a Think with Google I-Want-to-Buy Moments: How Mobile Has Reshaped the Purchase Journey blog, they shared five tips to win micro-moments. I supplemented them with further information that should help you execute: Identify your consumers’ I-want-to-buy moments. Talk to them—in stores, through surveys, in focus groups and forums—to figure out when and how they’re … Read more