Your products and services are delivering an experience to your customers regardless if you are consciously managing them. A good experience delights customers and generates a steady revenue stream while a poor experience sends customers to the competition and can be the demise of an organization. Savvy organizations understand their experience design maturity, invest in … Read more
In today’s experience economy, successful companies don’t stand out because of their efficient production or their better engineering. It is their dedication to understanding their customers and their strong commitment to solving customers’ problems and servicing their needs. In the article, Why Design Thinking is the Future of Management, Stefan Link shares: “Design Thinking helps … Read more
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
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
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
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
User story maps are a holistic view of your product backlog. Focus on the target outcomes and identifying the best way to ‘slice’ your MVP. A user story map is “a better version of a product backlog. Building a user story map helps us focus on the big picture – the product as a whole … Read more
I was recently interviewed by Carlos Marquez, CEO at Connexa. He was looking for clarity around Agile development and the roles that Customer Experience and User Experience play. Here’s what I shared: According to the latest definition of Agile software development on Wikipedia: “Agile software development describes a set of values and principles for software … Read more
I sat down with Armond Mehrabian, host of Portofino Media, to talk about the User Experience Manifesto. In past episodes we delved into Design Sprints and Agile UX at the Portofino studios but for this episode we met at at Nutmeg Bakery and Cafe. The ambiance was caffeinated. https://soundcloud.com/armond-5/here-comes-the-user-experience-manifesto
While helping BD Medical Technology redesign their intranet, I got the distinct honor and pleasure of working with the Nielsen Norman Group. NN/g conducted card sorts and tree studies with UserZoom. This also led to me doing a NN/g Design Thinking and Agile online seminar. UserZoom has been one of the primary sponsor of UX … Read more
Easy to Use was a good book. It covered much of what I have learned over my many years of creating great user experiences with agile development for enterprise software. But there were a few more things that I that I wanted to say. Easy to Use 2.0 covers new topics like user experience myths and … Read more
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