Agile UX Remote Usability Testing

Usability evaluations assess the degree to which your website, application, product or service can be used by your customers, the efficiency of your solution and the overall delightfulness you deliver. These evaluations are to validate that the tasks are easy to complete. It is a test of the ease of use of your offering not … Read more

Joint Application Design

IBM formalized the Joint Application Design process in 1974. In JAD, customers and end-users jointly define and design their solution with the solution provider that is developing and delivering it. It closes the gap in time and cost around understanding requirements early and throughout the application development lifecycle. In the JAD process, sessions are held … Read more

Easy to Use: Icons

Ever visit a website or store or see a sign in a public space that you had no idea what the icon meant? There are a lot of reasons for that. One, of course is the ethnocentric aspect – we know what we know based on our prior experiences. So, if the image of the … Read more

Marty Cagan and Continuous Discovery and Delivery

Marty Cagan gave a talk on The Root Causes of Product Failure at productcamp la. Many things that he shared resonated with me. Here are few ideas about the big difference between how most product teams work and the best product teams work: The Product Team. If you want to make great products, the product … Read more

Calm Technology

The terms “calm computing” and “calm technology” were coined in 1995 by PARC Researchers Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown in reaction to the increasing complexities that information technologies were creating. He felt that the promise of computing systems was that they might “simplify complexities, not introduce new ones.” Principles of Calm Technology Technology should require the smallest possible … Read more

Personas, Journey Maps, Service Blueprints, and Innovation

Personas Personas help you specify the context of use by identifying the people who will use your solution, what they will use it for, and under what conditions they will use it. They help you to create a point of view that is based on your target audiences’ needs and insights so you can see … 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

Service Blueprints – Going Beyond Customer Journey Maps

Where customer journey maps define your customers – prospects through advocates – touch points with your brand, products and services; service blueprints define the the behind-the-scenes people, processes and technology that supports that journey. Where creating a customer journey maps requires you to “walk in the shoes” of your customer and see your organization through … Read more

How True Innovation Happens When Usability Informs Technology at Google

From think with Google, Mobile App Development: How to Create a Useful App: “Our user-centric thinking guided us even as we began developing our app, and taught us how true innovation happens when usability informs technology. This—along with a deep dive into the principles of mobile app design—helped us take the right steps to design and … Read more

Value-Driven Design to Value-Centered Design

Value-Driven Design is a process where the design choices are made to maximize system value rather than to meet performance requirements. Value-Driven Design grew from a collaboration of three Technical Committees of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA): the Economics Technical Committee, the Systems Engineering Technical Committee, and the Multidisciplinary Optimization Technical Committee. … Read more

The Narrowing Effect: Understanding Time Pressure in Customer Experiences

The Narrowing Effect is a result of not having enough time to make a decision. To manage the stress of time crunches, we focus on a main task and ignore or filter out all other things. This helps us make a decision quickly when we have to but may increase our risk of not making … Read more

Globalization, Internationalization and Localization – What does all it Mean?

I get this one on a regular basis – especially working with global organizations’ product and services design and development. Here is how it breaks down: Globalization “Globalization is a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and governments of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by … Read more