Browsing the archives for the product development tag
Businesses frequently want an evaluation of their websites—mostly to know how they compare to the competition. Based on our experience, most businesses are disappointed with their website’s ability to convert visitors to loyal customers. In fact, many people say they aren’t really sure what their website does for them. To assess and enhance website effectiveness, [...]
The level of user experience effort that is practical for a given release depends, to some extent, on the type of release—that is, whether it is a major release, a minor release, or an update. Table 1 provides a summary of guidelines for the UX effort that is recommended for each type of release. Table [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
