Ethnography is the branch of anthropology that involves trying to understand how people live their lives. Unlike traditional market researchers, who ask specific, highly practical questions, anthropological researchers visit consumers in their homes or offices to observe and listen in a non directed way. In the HBR article, Ethnographic Research: A Key to Strategy, Ken … Read more
Interviews are one of the basic methods of requirements gathering, usability testing, and task analysis. In order to remove our personal biases, expectations and opinions from the questions asked, one of the questioning technique is non directed interview, sometimes called unstructured interview. Mike Kuniavsky, author and a twenty-year veteran of digital product development shares in … Read more
One of the questions that I get all the time is “What is the best Designer to Developer ratio?” As you can imagine, this can vary depending on marketplace and business goals. If you developing an engineering tool for engineers then your engineers who are developing it probably have a good idea of who is … Read more
We are now living in the ‘Age of the Customer’ where the pace of technologic advancement and customer empowerment continues to disrupt today’s business models. The key to competitive survival is data and insights-driven customer obsession. Customer obsession means constantly listening to customers and continuously testing, enhancing, and personalizing the customer experience. According to The … Read more
From the article,”To Understand Consumer Data, Think Like an Anthropologist” in From Data to Action: a Harvard Business Review Insight Center Report, Susan Fournier and Bob Rietveld share: “Corporate social-listening efforts are typically driven by econometricians, computer scientists, and IT technicians—the people who are experts in database management. They understand digital information, but they don’t always … Read more
Is big data enough? Aggregate numbers can tell you a lot, but they say very little about how individual customers are thinking and talking about your products. In the article, Don’t Let Data Paralysis Stand Between You and Your Customers, From Data to Action: a Harvard Business Review Insight Center Report, Harald Fanderl shares that: … Read more
You are providing solutions for your customers. Are you meeting their needs? How do you know? You know that Sales decreased or renewals went down or they left before they made the purchase. But why? If you want to know – if you want to do something about it – then you must measure it. … Read more
It is crucial to ensure that your products and services meets the needs and capabilities of your customers, particularly in terms of the experience you deliver meets your brand promise. Today’s rapidly changing markets requires a more lean and agile approach towards understanding your target audience earlier and reviewing your designs more often with them … Read more
A product or service feature will drift over time from a delightful innovation to a basic need. The drift is driven by customer expectations and by the level of performance from competing products. For example mobile phone batteries were originally large and bulky with only a few hours of charge. Over time we have come … Read more
“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” – Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO Amazon emphasizes platforms that each serves its own customers in the best and fastest possible way. Bezos shares … 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
I recently attended Jared Spool’s presentation “Insecure & Unintuitive: How We Need to Fix the UX of Security.” If you haven’t heard Jared speak then I recommend that you do. Jared is both highly entertaining and highly informative. In this presentation, Jared shared how organizations are losing millions of dollars because people don’t remember their … Read more