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 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

Don’t Listen to your Customers!

OK, that got your attention… Sometimes the best way to satisfy a customer’s need is to ignore their suggestions. Customers have ideas about incremental improvements to their workflow, but if we develop something that is truly innovative, our ideas probably won’t make sense to existing customers. Sometimes when we solve a market problem, our solution … Read more

Customer Profiling

online shopper

I once had a client that was rolling out their next generation behavioral targeting enterprise solution to their market and we needed to understand how the different market segments were going to use it… so we created customer profiles. We divided their customers into three categories: Those who used their solution strategically; those who used … Read more