In pursuit of new business, a small consulting firm was frequently asked if they had a website. Based on the demand-side information and needs of the business, the three missions of the website were to: Establish company credibility Be an easy-to-use networking tool Provide those working at the company with an easy-to-access, anywhere sales presentation … Read more
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, … Read more
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 … Read more
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
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
Product designers have tools they use to define activities, tasks, actions, and operations such as activity diagrams, wireframes, and prototypes. Product Design develops prototypes to elicit customer feedback to validate the solutions activities, tasks, and actions meet their needs. Wireframes are a quick and easy way to prototype a design for feedback. Wireframes are a … Read more
The product manager must have a concise vision for the product they can clearly articulate to the product designers. Put the customers and users activities in context of the market problem the solution is solving. Markets are made up of segments. We must be able to define our market segmentations in terms of their needs … Read more
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
A customer community is where customers gather to share ideas, advice, experiences and feelings. Customer communities allow the organization that host the community to “listen” to the groups talk about their industry, brand, products, and competitors. Customer-focused organizations create these communities to gain deep insight into their customers’ interests, decisions, and needs. Customer-focused companies listen … Read more
Customer Experience Management (CEM) is a strategy that focuses organizations around the needs of their customers. Moving customers from satisfied to loyal to advocate. As brands become increasingly commoditized, companies look to CEM to maintain their competitive advantage. CEM solutions integrate external and internal customer interactions to create a unified, consistent, end-to-end customer experiences. By … Read more
A customer’s perception of an organization is formed from their interaction across multiple-channels. Customer experience is the sum of all experiences a customer has with these many “touch points” – advertisements, website, marketing media, sales call, customer visits, package design, instructional material, products, services, support, billing, etc. A great customer experiences creates loyalty, grow sales … Read more
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