Human-Centered Design, Design Thinking and Design Making

Human-Centered Design (HCD), as the name implies, is designing solutions around people. HCD involves the human perspective in all steps of the problem-solving process by observing the problems within context, brainstorming, conceptualizing, developing, and implementing a solution.  It is the process that innovators like Apple and IDEO follow. In this process, you first need to clearly define the problem then … Read more

Designing Experiences with Lean Principles

The term “Lean” was first coined by John Krafcik in his 1988 article, “Triumph of the Lean Production System” based on his experience as a quality engineer in the Toyota-GM NUMMI joint venture in California. Adapting the principles from Lean manufacturing, Mary & Tom Poppendieck wrote Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit (May 18, 2003). … Read more

Building the Right Thing, Building it Right, Building it Fast

Markets are changing faster than ever. We are living Moore’s Law. In 1965, Intel co-founder, Gordon Moore, noticed that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since their invention. Moore predicted that this trend will continue into the foreseeable future. Although the pace has slowed (the number of … Read more

Before You Write Your Requirements, Create a Prototype

Prototype your ideas before you develop them. Use prototypes to solicit feedbacks from subject matter experts to ensure you are solving the right problem, to inform stakeholders, get feedback from your customers, and collaborate with development. Before you write your requirements, create a “prototype.” This could be a sketch – or sketches –  on a … Read more

Crafting Experiences for The Enterprise

In 2007, I wrote an article for Pragmatic Marketer magazine entitled “Easy to Use for Whom: Defining the Customer and User Experience for Enterprise Software.” I opened the article with: “Enterprise software is only easy to use if the customers and users think it is easy to use. To determine “ease of use,” first understand … Read more

Death of the Password with Better Authentication Design

I recently attended Jared Spool’s presentation “Insecure & Unintuitive: How We Need to Fix the UX of Security.” If you haven’t heard Jared speak then I recommend that you do. Jared is both highly entertaining and highly informative. In this presentation, Jared shared how organizations are losing millions of dollars because people don’t remember their … Read more

Product Management and Design Working Together

The best product development experiences I have had have been when the Product, Design and Development work together. One experience that comes to mind, is when the Product Manager, Development Manager and myself were working on a solution for a new market. We visited our main prospect, the largest organization in this market, with a … 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

Delivering Experience Design as a Service: An Interview with Steve Craig, Director, Products & Experience at Mitek

Steve Craig, Director of Products & Experience for Identity at Mitek, is a product leader known for creating and executing product vision and driving technology roadmaps in entrepreneurial environments as well as in Fortune 500 companies like HP and Intuit. He joins us today to talk about Experience Design as a Service (XDaaS). Thanks for joining … Read more

Design Thinking is Iterative and Cyclical

Design Thinking is an iterative process. In the larger context, we understand then explore then materialize our solution. Every step of the way is iterative. What we learn in one step of the process may cause us to go back and refine what we learned in a previous step. Especially when we prototype our ideas … Read more